NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

‘This is an excellent book, with an original and interesting approach to its topic.’
Stephen Gaukroger, University of Sydney.

‘I do not know of any other recent book which is comparable to this one in its focus,
range and approach. Naturalization of the Soul makes an important new contribution
to the literature on the history of theories of personal identity.’ E.J.Lowe, University
of Durham.

Naturalization of the Soul charts the development of the concepts of soul and self in
Western thought, from Plato to the present. The authors place particular emphasis
on the eighteenth century, which witnessed an enormous intellectual transformation
in the way theorists perceived self and personal identity and paved the way for
contemporary philosophical and psychological debates.

The present work fills a very important gap in intellectual history by being the

first book to trace the evolution of theories of self and personal identity throughout
the eighteenth century. Martin and Barresi initially examine the history of Western
thought on self and identity from Plato to Locke. The central chapters analyse the
evolution of these concepts from Locke in the seventeenth century to Hazlitt, at the
beginning of the nineteenth, exploring the two critical transitions which marked
this period: the move from a religious conception of soul to a philosophical
conception of self, and then to a scientific conception of mind. This rigorous and
erudite study becomes even more compelling by proving that contemporary theories
of self that have since the 1960s been debated by philosophers, as if for the first
time, were widely discussed in the eighteenth century. These include issues such as
the implications of fission examples for personal identity theory and the thesis that
personal identity is not what matters primarily in survival. Martin and Barresi also
break new ground by recognising the status of William Hazlitt as perhaps the most
significant personal identity theorist of the English Enlightenment, after Locke and
Hume, for his direct relevance to contemporary thinking.
Naturalization of the Soul makes a major contribution to our understanding of one
of the most radical transformations in the history of thought and is essential reading
for all who are interested in issues which lie at the core of the Western philosophical
tradition.

Raymond Martin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at
College Park. John Barresi is Professor of Psychology at Dalhousie University.

ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

1 NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Self and personal identity in the eighteenth century

Raymond Martin and John Barresi

NATURALIZATION

OF THE SOUL

Self and personal identity in the

eighteenth century

Raymond Martin and

John Barresi

London and New York

First published 2000

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in

any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0–415–21645–1 (Print Edition)

ISBN 0-203-02670-5 (Master e-book ISBN)

ISBN 0-203-16248-X (Glassbook Format)

TO TIMOTHY JOSEPH MARTIN

AND

ANTONIO AND FLORENCE BARRESI

vii

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Personal identity

Fission

The self as soul

Human nature

The self as mind

110

Future of the self

149

Notes

178

Bibliography

189

Index

199

PREFACE

In the eighteenth century in Britain, there was a revolution in personal identity
theory. In our own times, beginning in the early 1970s, there has been another.
It is well known that in the earlier revolution, the self as immaterial soul was
replaced with the self as mind. This replacement involved movement away
from substance accounts of personal identity, according to which the self is a
simple persisting thing, toward relational accounts of personal identity,
according to which the self consists essentially of physical and/or psychological
relations among different temporal stages of an organism or person.

At the heart of the revolution in our own times has been the emergence of

two questions where previously, it seemed, there had been only one. The
traditional question is: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for
personal identity over time? That is, what must obtain in order for the same
person to persist, and what, if it does obtain, guarantees that the same person
persists? The new question is: What matters fundamentally in a person’s
apparently self-interested concern to survive? That is, from the perspective of
what, in normal circumstances, would count as a person’s self-interested
concern to survive, is it fundamentally personal identity that matters—does
the person fundamentally want to persist—or is what matters other ways of
continuing that do not themselves suffice for identity? Readers unfamiliar with
the contemporary debate may want to read the section entitled, ‘Contemporary
philosophy of self and personal identity,’ in Chapter 6, before reading the rest
of the present book.

Probably, most philosophers who are engaged in the post-1970 debate over

self and personal identity suppose that the emergence of their ‘new question’
—what matters fundamentally in a person’s apparently self-interested concern
to survive—is a recent philosophical development. We too used to make this
assumption. Then we discovered William Hazlitt’s little-known, first book, An
Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), in which Hazlitt addressed
many of the core questions that were being hotly debated, as if for the first
time, in the 1970s. He even made important use of a kind of example—what
has come to be known as a fission example—that had been primarily responsible
for ushering in the recent revolution in personal identity theory.

PREFACE

Our discovery of Hazlitt’s early book quickly led to another discovery,

which was even more surprising. It was that Hazlitt had neither invented
fission examples nor been the first to see their relevance to personal identity
theory. Throughout the eighteenth century in Britain, fission examples had
been close to the center of a continuing and vigorous debate over self and
personal identity. In this debate, many of the core issues had been discussed
that since the 1970s have been discussed again, as if for the first time.
Eventually we were forced to the realization that it is only a slight
exaggeration to say that in the late twentieth century, personal identity
theorists were to a large extent merely replaying the unresolved concerns of
eighteenth century thinkers.

Although key elements of the eighteenth century debate over personal

identity and the debate in our own times are remarkably similar, the larger
contexts in which the two debates occurred is radically different. The
eighteenth century debate occurred in the context of a larger debate over the
naturalization of the soul. In our own times, the debate occurred against the
backdrop of an intellectual view in which the ‘soul’ had already been
naturalized. Central to the larger context in which the eighteenth century
debate took place were certain issues, such as whether matter can think,
which were thought to be highly relevant to views of self and personal
identity. Also central was intense concern over the fate of religion, and in
particular Christianity, in an era of increasing secularism. To understand the
evolution of the eighteenth century debate over self and personal identity,
one must keep one eye on its connections to the emerging science of human
nature and the other on its perceived relevance to religious concerns. We try
to do this.

Almost all of the theoretical action with which we shall be concerned

took place in Britain. In the eighteenth century, at least prior to Kant, this is
where the main action took place. However, in a fuller study, non-British
thinkers, especially Diderot and Rousseau in France, and Leibniz, Wolff,
and of course, Kant, in Germany, would have to be taken into account. Our
reason for ignoring these non-British thinkers is that, for the most part, until
at least the end of the eighteenth century, their views did not impinge much
on developments in Britain. Where their views may have had some influence,
such as in the case of Leibniz’s early views on metaphysics and Rousseau’s
on education, we consider them briefly. Eventually, of course, Kant’s
influence on English-speaking philosophy was enormous, but his influence
did not begin to be felt seriously in Britain until the nineteenth century. And
when his influence was finally felt, its effect was not primarily to continue
the tradition of debate over self and personal identity that had flourished in
Britain throughout the eighteenth century but, rather, to terminate that debate
in favor of another, rather different way of framing questions about the self.
With the exception of a few nineteenth century philosophers and
psychologists, such as William Hazlitt, Thomas Brown, James Mill, John

PREFACE

Stuart Mill and then eventually F.H.Bradley, it was not until the twentieth
century, in what became the analytic tradition in philosophy, that the most
conspicuous themes in the earlier eighteenth century British controversy
were rediscovered and debated anew.

The Introduction is a development of material, some of which is included in
Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern: An Experiential Approach to What Matters in
Survival (1998) and some in his ‘Personal Identity from Plato to Parfit’, in The
Experience of Philosophy, 4th edn, Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin (eds) (1999).
Chapter 1 is based on Martin’s paper, ‘Locke’s Psychology of Personal Identity’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy (1999). Chapter 2 draws on Raymond Martin,
John Barresi, and Alessandro Giovannelli’s, ‘Fission Examples in the Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Century Personal Identity Debate’, History of Philosophy
Quarterly (1998) and Raymond Martin and John Barresi’s, ‘Hazlitt on the Future
of the Self’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1995).

During 1996, while doing research at the Huntington Library, of San Marino,

California, John Barresi discovered A System of Pneumatology In A Series of
Lectures by the late Rev’d Mr. Henry Grove, 1786 (Huntington Manuscript
HM46326). Grove’s views are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The portions of
Grove’s manuscript that we have reproduced are by permission of The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. We wish to thank the Huntington for allowing us
to quote from this manuscript.

For their support of research that contributed to writing this book, we thank the

Research Development Fund of Dalhousie University, the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the General Research Board of the
University of Maryland.

Finally, we thank James Clark and Alessandro Giovannelli, each of whom read

the penultimate draft of this book and made many perceptive criticisms and helpful
suggestions. And John Barresi thanks his wife, Jolien, for her extraordinary patience
during the writing of this book, as well as for over thirty years of support and
encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, European philosophers were still
thinking about the self pretty much as philosophers had been thinking about it for
the previous two thousand years. The self was the soul, an immaterial substance.
But in Europe the seventeenth century was a time of momentous and soul-shattering
intellectual transformation. By the end of that century, Newton had shown that
there could be a natural philosophy of the external world. Progressive eighteenth
century thinkers were intent on showing that there could also be a natural philosophy
of the internal world. As a consequence of their attempts to develop one, by the
end of the eighteenth century the self had become the mind, a dynamic natural
system subject to general laws of growth and development.

In trying to be scientific, the new natural philosophers of human nature turned

away from dogmatic assertions about the essence of the soul in favor of investigating
the mind’s activities as found in experience. In attempting to explain how conscious
activities connected to each other over time, they confronted new possibilities about
the nature of self. The religious self, or soul, was an immaterial substance, naturally
immortal. Hence, there was never any question about its persisting into an afterlife.
In contrast, the empirical self, or mind, as discovered in conscious mental activity,
had all the appearances of a conceptual artifact. As a consequence, the debate over
how to understand ourselves, over what it is essentially that each of us is, provoked
not only intellectual controversy but existential terror.

To many important thinkers of the time it seemed that what could not possibly

be a question—whether we even exist as selves that persist from moment to moment,
let alone into an afterlife—had suddenly become one. It was as if these thinkers
had been forced against their wills to walk to the edge of a steep cliff and peer over
into the abyss. What they saw—that the self may be merely imaginary—caused
them to draw back in horror. As a consequence, at the end of the eighteenth century,
and even well into the nineteenth, many who contributed significantly to the new
empirical philosophy of human nature still thought that each human being had an
immaterial soul that was above nature. And even those who accepted the new
vision never came to terms with how they should feel about the self’s possibly
having only an imaginary or pragmatic status. In sum, whereas throughout most of
the seventeenth century the self had been a soul, by the end of the eighteenth
century it had become a mind, albeit one whose status as a real entity was obscure.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

One mystery, the immaterial soul, had been dropped. Another, the self as material
mind, had emerged to take its place.

Early seventeenth century views of selves and their persistence were the direct

decedents of classical theories. However, in classical times, there had not really
been a philosophical problem about selves or their persistence. Rather, there had
been a problem of death. The question of interest was not what accounts for the
fact that we persist from moment to moment, day to day, and so on through various
changes, but whether bodily death is the end. The topics of self and personal identity
entered the discussion through the back door, in the service of answering this more
pressing question. The decisive moment occurred in Plato’s Phaedo, in which
Socrates claimed that humans survive their bodily deaths. Socrates’ claim was not
unusual. What was unusual is that he then went on to explain, in a way that no one
had ever explained before, what accounts for the fact that humans survive. In his
view, what accounts for it is that humans have (or, are) immaterial souls.

In ancient times (and still today) almost everyone assumed that if humans survive

their bodily deaths, then there must be a vehicle (or medium) for their survivals.
However, even before anyone had thought of the idea of an immaterial (unextended)
soul, there was a ready vehicle available: ‘fine matter’. When Socrates was alive,
many Greeks thought that the soul leaves the body when the person who dies
expels his last breath; they also thought that at least at that moment the soul is that
last breath. It was Plato’s genius (or perversity) to have suggested a radical
alternative.

Although Plato never quite got the whole idea out, Socrates, in Phaedo, suggested

that the vehicle for survival is not any sort of physical object, not even breath, but
an unextended thing. So far as is known, this suggestion was original to Plato (or
Socrates). Previously, when others had talked of immaterial souls, they usually
meant invisible (though still extended) matter. Even Socrates, in Phaedo, did not
always distinguish sharply between some-thing’s being immaterial and its being
invisible. But sometimes he did distinguish between these. Subsequently, in the
third century CE, the pagan philosopher, Plotinus, as well as certain Church fathers,
including Clement, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, developed Plato’s idea that,
essentially, each of us is (or has) an immaterial, naturally indivisible soul. Then,
throughout the middle ages, Christian philosophers relied on this originally pagan
view to explain how people survived their bodily deaths.

How, then, if he did, did Plato arrive at the idea of an immaterial, unextended

soul? No one knows. In Phaedo, Socrates is concerned with the sources of
generation and corruption, that is, with how things come to be and pass away. In
his view, the corruption of a thing is brought about by its coming apart, that is, by
its breaking into pieces or decomposing. Plato may have reasoned that any extended
thing, merely in virtue of its being extended, is potentially divisible and, hence,
potentially corruptible. So, if people are immortal, not only by accident but
necessarily, then they have to be unextended and therefore immaterial.

INTRODUCTION

But why suppose that people are immortal? Along with others of the time, Plato

may have thought he had evidence that people survive the demise of their gross
physical bodies. In Phaedo, Socrates remarks that in graveyards people sometimes
see ghosts. But people would not have to be immortal to survive for a time the
demise of their gross physical bodies. It is not clear why Plato thought that people
are immortal. Nor is it clear why Aristotle, in spite of his more scientific turn of
mind, followed Plato in assuming that people (or, at least, nous, the rational part of
the human soul) is immortal. Of course, in Phaedo Socrates does not just assert the
immortality of the soul, he argues for it. So, in a sense we know why Plato may
have believed that souls are immortal. But Socrates’ arguments are murky and
unconvincing. In any case, it was not his arguments for immortality but later ones,
mainly deriving from Plotinus, that became the main source of support for the
Platonic view that the soul is an unextended, indivisible, immaterial substance
and, as such, incorruptible and naturally immortal.

It is a little clearer why Plato (or Socrates) thought it mattered whether people

survive the demise of their gross physical bodies. He thought that in trying to
understand the nature of reality, one’s body is a distraction. In his view, if thinkers
could discard their bodies, it would help them to discover eternal truths. In addition,
Plato tells us that in one of Socrates’ last thoughts, he mused about the joys of
conversing with the dead. If Plato thought that after peoples’ bodily deaths, they
can converse with other people who have also died, then he must have supposed
that souls carry with them through the process of bodily death at least some of
their associated mental dispositions, such as their memories. Since Plato (or
Socrates) looked forward to conversing with the dead, he must have also thought
that people are entitled to anticipate having the experiences of their post-mortem
selves.

A few centuries later, Lucretius questioned this latter assumption. As a materialist,

he did not believe that humans have immaterial souls but, rather, that they have
minds or ‘spirits’ that are composed of fine matter. Even so, he took the view that
the persistence of one’s spirit, were this to occur, would not entitle a person to
anticipate having future experiences. In the context of his making the point that we
have nothing to fear from bodily death, he said that ‘if any feeling remains in mind
or spirit after it has been torn from body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into
being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced’. He then
considered the possibility that ‘the matter that composes us should be reassembled
by time after our death and brought back into its present state’. It may seem that in
Lucretius’ materialistic view, the matter’s being brought into its present state would
ensure not only that it would exactly resemble one’s own current body but also
that the body replicated would be attended with a mentality exactly like one’s own
current mentality. So, among other things, it may seem that this happening would
ensure that whatever one likes or dislikes now, one’s replica also would like or
dislike, whatever one intends to do now, one’s replica (at least at the moment of its
creation) also would intend to do, whatever one remembers now, one’s replica also
would seem to remember, and so on. This may or may not have been Lucretius’

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

view. In any event, he clearly thought that one’s replica would not truly remember
having been oneself now. Thus, he claimed that even if after bodily death, one
were to be replicated, the replica would ‘be no concern of ours once the chain of
our identity [repetentia] had been snapped’ (Lucretius 1951:121).

Why would the replica be of no concern to the person who was replicated?

Lucretius answers, in effect, by making two points. First, since at our bodily deaths
our memories are dissipated we cease at our bodily deaths. Second, our continuing
as the same persons we now are is a precondition of any rational egoistic concern
we might have in the experiences of anyone who might exist in the future, including
(except for the difference in memories) an exact replica of ourselves. He said, ‘If
the future holds travail and anguish in store, the self [that is, a unique union of
body and spirit that is continuous with one’s current body and spirit and has a
normal pattern of memories] must be in existence, when that time comes, in order
to experience it.’ ‘From this fate’, Lucretius continued, ‘we are redeemed by death,
which denies existence to the self that might have suffered these tribulations’. The
moral of these reflections, he thought, is ‘that we have nothing to fear in death’
since ‘one who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has
never been born, when once this mortal life has been usurped by death the immortal’
(Lucretius 1951:122).

Lucretius immediately followed this passage with the reflection that, for all we

know, the very arrangement of matter which, in his view, each of us currently
consists in, may in the limitless past have already existed, and that if it did exist,
then that past person too is of no concern to us. Thus, in the context of arguing that
we have nothing to fear from death, Lucretius acknowledged the existence of what
today we would call self-concern, that is, a special way of caring about persons
who existed in the past or will exist in the future that ordinarily occurs only if the
persons cared about are ourselves. In articulating what he took to be the prerequisites
for rational self-concern, Lucretius employed thought-experiments in which he
imagined that something that is currently part of us survives bodily death and is
capable of having experiences and of performing actions. However, he then insisted
that since this part of ourselves would neither be continuous with us nor have
normal memory access to our lives—for it to be continuous, our bodies would
have to persist through death as integrated, functioning entities, in which case we
never would have died in the first place—this surviving part of ourselves would
neither be us nor any concern of ours. He concluded that, since this surviving part
of ourselves would not be us, its experiences and actions are not something we can
look forward to having and performing. In other words, in the case of post-mortem
‘replicas’ of ourselves, Lucretius’ reason for saying that death is of no concern is
that for it to be of concern we would have to be rationally entitled to anticipate
having the experiences of these replicas, and we are not rationally entitled to
anticipate this because any such replicas would not literally be ourselves.
Unfortunately, Lucretius did not then further defend this view. He merely asserted
it. Even so, his discussion is impressive, not so much because he answered the
question of what matters primarily in survival by saying that it is personal identity,

INTRODUCTION

that is, our continuous existence as integrated bodily, spiritual, and remembering
entities, but because he thought to ask this question. No one previously, at least in
the West, had thought to ask it.

As we shall see in Chapter 5, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,

the question of whether identity or something else matters primarily in survival
resurfaced again, at the heart of the theoretical transformation in which the
immaterial soul became naturalized. In our own times, as we shall see in Chapter
6, this same question of whether identity matters primarily resurfaced once again,
even more dramatically. In this latest incarnation of the question, the issue arose
especially in connection with the work of Derek Parfit and other theorists
sympathetic to his views (Parfit 1984).

Suppose Lucretius had thought to argue for his view that personal identity, or

continuous existence of a sort that requires the unity of body and spirit, is what
matters primarily in survival. How might he have argued for it? A natural move for
him to have made would have been, first, to have distinguished between personal
unity at a time and personal unity over time and, then, to have argued that whatever
explains one of these unities should also explain the other. In his view, it is the
union of body and spirit that explains both unities. Consequently, since nothing
but the union of body and spirit could preserve personal unity after bodily death,
and necessarily (it would seem) at bodily death body and spirit come apart (since
the body, at least, decays), then necessarily at bodily death the person perishes.

In contrast to this way in which Lucretius may have viewed survival, in Plato’s

earlier view, it is enough if peoples’ souls persist, along with many of their mental
dispositions. In fact, in Plato’s view, the soul without the body is actually preferable
to the soul with the body. Plato may also have assumed that before bodily death it
is the soul alone that explains the unity in people that matters, which for him, at
least when he wrote Phaedo, probably was simply mental unity. If this is right,
Plato would have agreed with Lucretius that in bodily death the union of soul
(spirit) and body dissolves, but he would have disagreed with Lucretius that what
at bodily death dissolves—the union of soul (spirit) and body—matters. In Plato’s
view, the body is a useless appendage, which the person is better off having
discarded.

What, though, in Plato’s view, accounts for the unity, at a time, of our souls?

What accounts for the unity, at a time, of our mental lives? Plato did not raise these
questions. Had he raised them, presumably his answer would have had to do with
the soul’s immateriality and, hence, with its indivisibility. About six centuries later,
Plotinus did raise these questions. He argued that unity of either sort, that is, of
either the soul or the mind, would be impossible if the soul were matter, because
matter is inherently divisible in a way that would destroy its own and also the
mind’s unity. While conceding that the soul also is divisible, he argued that it is
divisible in a way that does not interfere with unity. The nature, at once divisible
and indivisible, which we affirm to be soul has not the unity of an extended thing:
it does not consist of separate sections; its divisibility lies in its presence at every
point in the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in any part’. Plotinus

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

then observed that if the soul ‘had the nature of body, it would consist of isolated
members each unaware of the conditions of each other’. In that case, he continued,
‘there would be a particular soul—say, a soul of the finger—answering as a distinct
and independent entity to every local experience’ and, hence, ‘there would be a
multiplicity of souls administering each individual’. But the mental lives of such
individuals, he pointed out, would be unlike our mental lives, so each of us cannot
be administered by a multiplicity of (equal) souls. ‘Without a dominant unity’, he
concluded, ‘our lives would be “meaningless”’ (Plotinus 1952:140).

In what in our own times has come to be known as a fission example, a person’s

consciousness divides into two parts, each of which is mentally complete in itself
and neither of which is conscious, from the inside, of the other’s mental states.
Probably Plotinus was not thinking directly about fission. But fission was not far
from his thoughts.

Nevertheless, as we shall see in Chapter 1, the passage last

quoted from Plotinus is similar to one in which Locke introduced fission examples
to the eighteenth century. Locke even used the image of a finger’s retaining an
independent consciousness after it had been separated from the rest of the body.
Probably Locke had read Plotinus; if not, he was at least familiar with Plotinus’
views through the Cambridge Platonists.

In any case, among the questions that

eighteenth century philosophers (but not Locke) soon asked about fission examples,
two are crucial: What becomes of the identity of the person (or mind) that divides
—does he (or it) persist? And, regardless of how that question is answered, in a
fission scenario could the pre-fission person obtain after fission what prior to fission
mattered primarily to him in survival?

The Platonic conception of self, especially in its neo-Platonic form, was congenial

to Christian theology. Largely but not exclusively for that reason it survived in
Europe more or less intact until modern times. In the late middle ages, particularly
in the work of Thomas Aquinas, the Platonic conception became integrated with
an Aristotelian view. According to this view the living person is composed of a
material body informed by an immaterial soul; in the initial stage of the afterlife,
the individual is merely a soul; and at the resurrection, when the individual is
again reunited with the body, there is once again a complete person. However,
even in this integrated account, the essential core of the Platonic view, belief in an
immaterial soul-substance that because it is immaterial is also indivisible and, hence,
naturally immortal, remained intact.

This Platonic view was thought to be crucial to defending the Christian dogma

of life after bodily death. It would not be abandoned without a struggle. The decisive
phase of this struggle occurred in the eighteenth century. However, the view
persisted, even among intellectuals, well into the nineteenth century and has
resurfaced again in our own times. To the extent that it ever fell into disrepute, it
did so only after the general acceptance among educated people of evolutionary
theory. In the end, it was Darwin who fully naturalized the connection between
humans and other animals and, thus, made humans an integrated part of the natural
world.

INTRODUCTION

Descartes, in the early seventeenth century, was the first influential modern

philosopher to free up the Platonic view from its Aristotelian accretions. The main
question for Descartes, so far as immaterial souls were concerned, is how they fit
into an otherwise wholly material world, governed by mechanistic laws. In his
view, individual souls of living humans are in a one-to-one relationship with
individual human bodies. So, for him, the immediate question was how each
person’s own soul is related to his own body. The answer, he thought, is that each
soul exists in a relation of mutual influence with its body and that this influence is
exerted through the pineal gland.

Although Descartes was a dualist as extreme as Plato, in claiming that thinking

is the essence of mind and extension the essence of body, he distinguished between
mind and body more clearly than had Plato. Descartes also expressed more
adequately the intimacy of the connection between mind and body. Specifically,
he rejected the idea, which may well have been congenial to Plato, that the
relationship of oneself as a thinking thing to one’s body is like that of a pilot to his
ship:

Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and
so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in
a ship [in the French version: ‘as a pilot in his ship’] but that I am very
closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the
body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking
thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive
the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if
anything in his ship is broken. Similarly, when the body needed food
or drink, I should have an explicit understanding of the fact, instead of
having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For these sensations
of hunger, thirst, pain and so on are nothing but confused modes of
thinking which arise from the union and, as it were, intermingling of
the mind with the body.

(Descartes 1984:56)

Here, Descartes drew attention to the importance of what today we might call

self-concern. The aspect of self-concern that particularly interest him in these
remarks is an ingredient of sensations. Presumably it consists, at least in part, in a
kind of identification people make with the content of their sensations, as a
consequence of which they feel that something has happened to them, rather than
merely think that it has happened to their bodies. In Descartes’ view, this feeling is
due to the way oneself as a thinking thing is causally connected to one’s body.
Descartes’ dualism prevented him from saying much that is informative about the
nature of these causal connections, but what is interesting in his account is the
suggestion that the unity of the person—mind and body—is due to the person’s
being a causally integrated system. In acknowledging this unity, and suggesting

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

this explanation of its source, Descartes initiated exploration of the psychological
mechanisms of self-constitution.

As we shall see in Chapter 1, Locke, perhaps as a consequence of taking these

remarks of Descartes seriously, returned to the theme of identification and elevated
it to a central position in his own theory of personal identity. Locke’s word for the
form of identification that interested him is appropriation, a notion he used to put
together the first ever, fully-fledged empirical account of self-constitution. This
aspect of Locke’s account was then mostly ignored by subsequent eighteenth
century philosophers. However, Bishop Butler, one of Locke’s keenest critics,
picked up on it in drawing the consequence, which Butler abhorred, that if Locke’s
account of self-constitution were correct, the self would be fictional. Butler then
reasserted the Platonic view that our relations to our bodies are like those of a pilot
to his ship.

Descartes had an additional view about consciousness which was at least as

influential as the one just mentioned. It is that all thought is intrinsically reflexive;
that is, necessarily if a person is aware, then he is also aware that he is aware. In
reply to Hobbes and in the context of explaining what he meant by idea, Descartes
said, ‘When I want something, or am afraid of something, I simultaneously perceive
that I want, or am afraid’; and ‘It is certain that we cannot will anything without
thereby perceiving that we are willing it’ (Descartes 1984:127). However, the
clearest statement of his commitment to the necessarily reflexive character of
thought comes in his reply to the seventh set of objections to the Meditations. In
these objections, Bourdin complained that in holding that for a substance to be
superior to matter and wholly spiritual, it is ‘not sufficient for it to think’ but ‘is
further required that it should think that it is thinking, by means of a reflexive act’,
Descartes was multiplying entities beyond necessity. Descartes replied that ‘the
initial thought by means of which we become aware of something does not differ
from the second thought by means of which we become aware that we were aware
of it, anymore than this second thought differs from a third thought by which we
become aware that we were aware that we were aware’ (Descartes 1984:382).
Thus, in Descartes’ view, each thought not only encapsulates perhaps infinitely
many reflexive mental acts but also necessarily incorporates a self-reference. This
latter view, as we shall see, thwarted the emergence of a developmental psychology
of the acquisition of self-concepts. For if people cannot think at all without also
thinking that they think, then it is impossible to trace in the pattern of the ways
people learn to think the gradual development of the ability to think of themselves.

Even so, Descartes sometimes teetered on the brink of discussing self-concepts

developmentally, particularly in distinguishing between the consciousness of infants
and adults. For instance, in a letter to Arnauld, written seven years after the
Meditations, Descartes made a distinction between ‘direct and reflective thoughts’.
As an example of the former, he cites ‘the first and simple thoughts of infants’,
such as ‘the pleasure they feel when nourished by sweet blood’. On the other hand,
he continued, ‘when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that
he has not felt it before’, we should call this ‘second perception reflection’ and

INTRODUCTION

attribute it ‘to the intellect alone, in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the
two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other’ (Descartes
1991, v.3:357).

So far as theories of identity, in general, and personal identity, in particular, are

concerned, both Hobbes and Spinoza, by championing their own relational views,
set the stage for Locke’s relational view of personal identity.

Of the two, Hobbes

was more influential, primarily for introducing the idea that the form of a thing,
that is, its organizational structure, rather than the stuff of which it is composed,
can be used as a criterion of its identity:

If the name be given for such form as is the beginning of motion, then,
as long as that motion remains, it will be the same individual thing; as
that man will be always the same, whose actions and thoughts proceed
all from the same beginning of motion, namely, that which was in his
generation; and that will be the same river which flows from one and
the same fountain, whether the same water, or other water, or something
else than water, flow from thence; and that the same city, whose acts
proceed continually from the same institution, whether the men be the
same or no.

(Hobbes 1656:137)

In Locke’s hands, this idea would be used to construct a powerful rival to the

Platonic conception of the person.

In 1690, just four years before Locke added his chapter on identity to the second

edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, William Sherlock
promulgated a view about the Trinity which Locke was aware of and which may
have influenced him.

Sherlock’s innovation was to use consciousness, rather than

substance, as a criterion of personhood. In his view, what distinguishes the three
divine Persons, each of whom share the same substance, is consciousness, and
what unites the three Persons as one God is also consciousness, albeit of a different
kind. In other words, the Divine Substance has two different sorts of consciousness,
one of which makes the three Persons three and another of which makes them
One. Sherlock—like Locke and perhaps even because of Locke, who had recently
published the first edition of the Essay—began his account of the Trinity by
confessing our human inability to know the essence of substance:

It is agreed by all Men whoever considered this matter, that the essences
of things cannot be known, but only their properties and qualities: The
World is divided into Matter, and Spirit, and we know no more, what
the substance of Matter, than what the substance of a Spirit is, though
we think we know one, much better than the other.

(Sherlock 1690:7)

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Then, Sherlock explained what ‘makes any Substance numerically One’ by,

first, describing identity conditions for unorganized Matter and, then, for living
organisms. Subsequently, in the second edition of the Essay, Locke would follow
this same order of exposition.

Sherlock then said that a different account was required for ‘finite created Spirits

which have neither parts nor extension’, and that this account depends essentially
on the notion of consciousness. In his view, the ‘numerical Oneness [of created
Spirits] can be nothing else, but every Spirit’s Unity with itself, and distinct and
separate subsistence from all other created Spirits’, which consists of its ‘Self-
consciousness’. By a Spirit’s self-consciousness, Sherlock meant the fact that each
Spirit feels ‘only its own Thoughts and Passions, but is not conscious to the Thoughts
and Passions of any other Spirit’. (Sherlock 1690:48–9).

The same holds for the Divine Spirit: ‘As far as consciousness reaches, so far

the unity of a Spirit extends, for we know no other unity of a Mind or Spirit, but
consciousness.’ Sherlock added that:

In a created Spirit this consciousness extends only to itself, and therefore
self-consciousness makes it One with itself, and divides and separates
it from all other Spirits; but could this consciousness extend to other
Spirits, as it does to itself, all these Spirits, which were mutually
conscious to each other, as they are to themselves, though they were
distinct Persons, would be essentially One: And this is that essential
unity, which is between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, who are
essentially united by mutual consciousness to whatever is in each other,
and do by an internal sensation (I want other words to express it in)
feel each other, as they do themselves; and therefore are as essentially
One, as a Mind and Spirit is One with itself.

(Sherlock 1690:68)

Although unified by mutual consciousness into One God, the Divine Persons

are also distinguished from each other by Self-consciousness:

The distinction between these Three Infinite Minds is plain according
to this Notion; for they are distinguished, just as Three finite, and created
Minds are, by Self-consciousness: …each Divine Person has a Self-
consciousness of its own, and knows and feels itself (if I may so speak)
as distinct for the other Divine Persons; the Father has a Self-
consciousness of his own, whereby he knows and feels himself to be
the Father, and not the Son, nor the Holy Ghost…as James feels himself
to be James, and not Peter, nor John; which proves them to be distinct
Persons: …Here is no confounding of Persons.

(Sherlock 1690:67)

INTRODUCTION

In sum, in Sherlock’s view, what distinguishes the three Divine Persons is ‘self-

consciousness’ and what unites them is ‘mutual consciousness’. Sherlock never
succeeded in explaining how these two are different. For present purposes, this
deficiency in his account is not important. What is important is that he used
consciousness, not substance, to unite the disparate parts of persons and to mark
the boundaries between persons. It was this idea that may have influenced Locke
and through Locke modern personal identity theory.

In spite of these ways in which Hobbes, Spinoza, and Sherlock anticipated his

views, Locke deserves his title as father of modern personal identity theory. Locke
integrated ideas he borrowed from others with ones which were wholly his own,
weaving both together into a highly influential general theory of identity. In the
case of personal identity, he had two fundamental doctrines, one negative and one
positive. The negative doctrine is that the persistence of persons cannot be
understood as parasitic upon the persistence of any underlying substance(s) out of
which humans (or persons) may be composed. The positive doctrine is that the
persistence of persons has to be understood in terms of the unifying role of
consciousness. Prior to Locke there had been mostly a priori philosophies of
personal identity. Locke was the first to propose an empirically grounded psychology
of personal identity.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

The first edition of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
appeared in December of 1689. In his ‘Epistle to the Reader’, Locke says that
his book was prompted by a philosophical discussion among he and ‘five or
six Friends’ that came ‘quickly at a stand, by the Difficulties that rose on every
side’. It seemed to Locke that he and his friends ‘took a wrong course’ and that
before setting ‘ourselves upon Enquiries of that Nature, it was necessary to
examine our own Abilities, and see, what Objects our Understandings were, or
were not fitted to deal with’ (Locke 1975:7). His goal was to determine the
limits of human understanding. He resolved to follow what he called a
‘Historical, plain Method’, by which he meant an account not of how the Mind
actually comes to be furnished with its Ideas but rather of how through
experience it could have acquired them. That is, Locke analyzed complex and
abstract ideas into simple components, all of which, in his view, easily could
have come from experience. He thought that by such means ‘we can find out,
how far the Understanding can extend its view; how far it has Faculties to
attain Certainty; and in what Cases it can only judge and guess’ (Locke 1975:44–
5).

Locke abjured making contributions to ‘the Physical Consideration of the

Mind’. Instead, he set himself the modest task of toiling merely ‘as an Under-
Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that
lies in the way to Knowledge’, so that others who were engaged in what later
would be regarded as properly scientific pursuits could work unobstructed
(Locke 1975:10). Locke’s self-characterization of his project is largely accurate.
In later terms, he was not doing scientific psychology, but, rather, a quasi-
historical, empirical investigation of the origins of knowledge, from which he
claimed to derive empirical epistemological results.

Locke argued against two philosophical traditions: the Aristotelian

Scholasticism of his day, in which he was educated and for which he had no
respect, and Cartesian Rationalism, which he regarded as his real competition.
To oppose the latter, Locke began the Essay with a long, repetitive diatribe
against the doctrine of innate ideas, in which he assumed that if anyone ever
has innate ideas, then everyone always has them; in particular, if anyone ever

PERSONAL IDENTITY

has them, then idiots and savages have them, and normal, civil-ized people
have them from birth.

Even at the beginning of the first edition of the Essay, in his critique of

innate ideas, Locke seized the opportunity to express his concern and
puzzlement over the issue of human or personal identity. For example, to
illustrate how utterly absurd it is to suppose that anyone has from birth an
innate idea of identity, he remarked, that ‘if Identity (to instance in that alone)
be a native Impression; and consequently so clear and obvious to us, that we
must needs know it even from our Cradles, I would gladly be resolved, by one
of Seven, or Seventy Years old, Whether a Man, being a Creature, consisting of
Soul and Body, be the same Man, when his Body is changed’, for instance,
‘Whether Euphorbus and Pythagoras, having had the same Soul, were the same
Man, though they lived several Ages asunder?’ (Ibid.: I.iv.4;86).

As Locke continued it became clear that he was not worried just about

whether people have an innate idea of identity but about the theological
implications of any proper theory of identity: ‘Nor let anyone think, that the
Questions, I have here proposed, about the Identity of Man, are bare, empty
Speculations; which if they were, would [still] be enough to shew, That there
was in the Understandings of Men no innate Idea of Identity’.

He, that shall, with a little Attention, reflect on the Resurrection,
and consider, that Divine Justice shall bring to Judgment, at the
last Day, the very same Persons, to be happy or miserable in the
other, who did well in This Life, will find it, perhaps, not easy to
resolve with himself, what makes the same Man, or wherein Identity
consists: And will not be forward to think he, and every one, even
Children themselves, have naturally a clear Idea of it.

(Ibid.: I.iv.5;86)

What Locke is saying here is that if the reader thinks he has a clear understanding
of these matters even now, in his maturity, let alone in his childhood, that shows
that he has never really thought about it. The context suggests that Locke thinks
the issue is so profoundly puzzling that this example by itself all but decisively
refutes the doctrine of innate ideas, at least in its application to the idea of
identity.

Four years later, in the second edition of the Essay (1694), Locke addressed

in its own separate chapter the issue of identity and diversity. The heart of this
chapter is his account of personal identity. In 1694 Cartesians, Neo-Platonists,
and even Aristoteleans had been taking the identity of a person to depend
essentially on the continuity of an immaterial soul, which was thought to be
indivisible and, hence, naturally immortal. These theorists differed on how
matter could combine with soul to form a person. But virtually all of them
accepted the doctrine of the resurrection and so were concerned to provide an
account that would explain how the same persons who had lived on Earth could

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

live again in the afterlife. They relied in their accounts of this on the idea that
during the interim between bodily death and the resurrection the soul persists.
Most thought that for the soul to persist, it had to be mentally active
continuously. They hotly debated whether the soul would join again with the
same or with different matter. Then, onto the stage of this rather scholastic
debate, Locke burst forth with the genuinely radical and progressive thesis
that persons are distinct from humans and do not depend for their persistence
on retaining either the same soul or the same material body, but on having the
same consciousness.

Almost all views of self and personal identity prior to Locke’s were pre-

modern in that they relied on the notion of an immaterial soul. The self is the
soul, a simple immaterial substance that by its very nature maintained unity
both at a time and over time, and is naturally immortal. The basis of the self’s
unity with matter to form a living human being was a source of unbounded
debate, virtually all of which was purely scholastic in that it rested on a priori
metaphysics, rather than on issues open to empirical investigation.

Aristotelians

maintained that the soul informed matter, providing it with life and, in the case
of humans, also with rationality and immortality.

Cartesians maintained that

all living things except humans are just biological machines, whereas humans
are machines made conscious by their connection somehow with an immaterial
soul. Both groups, largely because of their reliance on the soul, were predisposed
to give, and actually gave, static, non-developmental accounts of human
mentality on the basis of which the distinction between self and other is
unproblematic.

Locke’s account, while not fully modern (he retained his belief in the

immaterial soul and in the refexive nature of consciousness), was the point of
departure for the subsequent development of modern theories. Unlike previous
theories, Locke’s theory was grounded in experience and open to empirical
investigation. Thus, it became the point of departure for the subsequent
development of modern theories. By the end of the eighteenth century the
transition to modern theories of the self and personal identity had been
completed, at least in the views of some thinkers. Our purpose is to explain not
so much every nuance in Locke’s account, particularly in his metaphysics, but
rather to show how Locke sowed the seeds for this transition to modern theories.
For this purpose, it is more important to determine what ideas others could
find in Locke’s account than what ideas Locke intended them to find.

In Britain, every significant eighteenth century thinker took Locke’s account

of personal identity seriously. Most of them struggled, as anyone who grapples
with Locke’ account must, even to understand what his view was. Yet, as we
shall see, his account, while chaotic, is so rich in potent ideas that the struggle
to understand it inevitably brought thinkers face to face with most of what they
needed to make the transition to modern views. Ironically, had Locke expressed
himself more coherently, his account of personal identity may well have been
less influential than it was.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

Inanimate objects, plants, and animals

Fortunately, some things about Locke’s account are relatively clear. He proposed
separate accounts of the identity conditions for inanimate objects, animate objects,
and persons. Setting aside, for a moment, his account of the identity conditions for
artifacts, in the case of inanimate objects, Locke’s view was that an individual at
one time and one at another are the same just if they are composed of exactly the
same matter. A heap of sand remains the same heap so long as it does not either
gain or lose a grain, even if the grains are rearranged. Apparently, Locke thought
of composite inanimate objects, implausibly in our view, as if they were sets, rather
than wholes composed of parts.

In the case of plants and animals, Locke held that an individual at one time and

one at another are the same just if each has the kind of shape appropriate to that
sort of plant or animal and sustains the same life. The shape of an animal, not its
mentality, determines what biological kind of thing it is. Unless one recognizes
this, Locke thought, one might be tempted to say of a rational parrot, if there were
one, that it is a human. The life of a thing is simply a way in which its (perhaps
exclusively) material parts are organized so as to promote its functioning in a manner
appropriate to the sort of thing it is. And a plant or animal can so function even if
the matter (and/or spirit) out of which it is composed at any given time is replaced
by different matter (and/or spirit). In sum, still leaving the question of artifacts to
one side, in Locke’s view, in the case of inanimate objects, composition but not
organization matters and, in the case of animate objects, shape and organization
but not composition or mentality matters. In the case of artifacts, Locke
acknowledged the importance of function and allowed for replacement of matter,
but he did this not in his chapter on identity and not systematically, but intermittently,
in different parts of the Essay (Ibid.: III.vi.40;464. Also, III.vi.41;465).

Persons

In the case of persons, Locke is unequivocal: consciousness and only
consciousness matters. Thus, although biological kind, in virtue of its relation
to shape and life, is essential to humanhood, it is not essential to personhood.
In Locke’s view, a rational parrot could not be a human and, hence, a fortiori,
could not be the same human as an individual at another time. But a rational
parrot could be the same person as an individual at another time.

On one interpretation of Locke’s account, an individual at one time and one

at a later time are the same person only if the individual at the later time is
conscious of having experienced or done what the individual at the earlier
time experienced or did. On what is possibly another interpretation, an
additional requirement is that the individual at the later time has the ‘same
consciousness’ as the individual at the earlier time. Whether these seemingly
different interpretations collapse into one depends on whether satisfying the
requirement of the first guarantees that the individuals in question have the

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

same consciousness. A reason why it might not guarantee this is that, in Locke’s
view, qualitative similarity of consciousness, especially in cases in which the
later consciousness simply takes up where the earlier left off, might not
guarantee numerical identity of consciousness. For instance, when the later
individual ‘wakes up’ from a period of unconsciousness, the mere replication
in him of a previous consciousness may not guarantee sameness of
consciousness, but only mere similarity of consciousness.

In general, when Locke used the phrase ‘is conscious of, in the context of

talking about personal identity over time, he meant ‘remembers’, which is also
ambiguous as between the two interpretations just distinguished. In any case,
there is a textual basis for supposing that Locke, in his capacity as a theorist of
personal identity over time, was a memory theorist, and a rather simple-minded
one at that; that is, there is a basis for supposing that Locke proposed to define
or analyze personal identity in terms of memory. For the most part, this is how
Locke has been interpreted ever since the publication of the second edition of
the Essay, but particularly by his eighteenth-century critics.

As far as it goes, the simple memory interpretation of Locke’s account of

personal identity over time is almost, but not quite, correct. As we shall see,
Locke made some allowances for forgetfulness. More importantly, Locke may
not have been trying, in the first place, to present a non-circular analysis of
personal identity over time. Even aside from such qualifications, however, the
simple memory interpretation of Locke is, at best, radically incomplete. For
central to Locke’s account of the self is the idea that consciousness is reflexive
and that it plays a dual role in self-constitution: it is what unifies a person not
only over time but also at a time. Memory interpretations, whether simple or
not, do not explain how consciousness plays this dual role.

Even so, it is clear that an important part of what Locke meant by

consciousness has to do with memory. Most of his eighteenth-century critics
seized upon this aspect of his account, while basically ignoring the rest, in
order to attribute to Locke the simple memory view. According to that view, a
person at one time and one at another have the same consciousness, and hence
are the same person, just in case the person at the later time remembers having
had experiences or having performed actions that were had or performed by
the person at the earlier time. As we shall see in a moment, these critics were
right in thinking that this simple memory view of personal identity is vulnerable
to decisive objections. However, in the eighteenth century almost all of Locke’s
critics wanted to defeat the simple memory view in order to retain the
(immaterial) soul view. But even the simple memory view of personal identity
which they attributed to Locke is, in important respects, an advance on the
soul view.

According to the soul view, personal identity depends on sameness of soul.

As simple, immaterial substances, souls are not part of the natural world.
Whatever exists or obtains, but not as part of the natural world, is inherently
mysterious. Other peoples’ souls cannot be observed either directly or indirectly.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

And since only the activities and not the substance of the soul is open to
empirical investigation, there is no way to detect by observing an individual
whether his soul remains the same. Hence, on the soul view, personal identity
is inherently mysterious.

On the simple memory interpretation of Locke’s account, by contrast,

personal identity depends on the presence of a psychological relationship—
remembering—that binds together earlier and later stages of a person. Other
peoples’ rememberings, unlike their souls, can be observed indirectly. For
instance, by listening to another talk one may be able to determine that they
remember having experienced or done various things. In the case of oneself,
each person may observe directly, via introspection, that he or she remembers
having experienced and done various things. Only by explaining personal
identity in terms of things or relations that are observable can an account of it
be developed on the basis of which one can determine empirically whether a
person at one time and one at another are the same.

For this reason, Locke’s account of personal identity was not just another in

a long tradition of such accounts that began with Plato. Rather, his account
was an idea whose time had come. As Locke seems to have recognized, the
kind of view that he was proposing was irresistible. By contrast, his critics,
though right in thinking that the simple memory view that they attributed to
Locke is deeply flawed, failed to notice that their own views were more deeply
flawed. So far as the verdict of history is concerned the soul view was not just
a wrong account of personal identity, it was the wrong kind of account. The
simple memory view of personal identity, by contrast, was the right kind of
account, even if it was not the right account. In short, Locke’s critics failed to
see that even the simple memory view was riding on the crest of a wave of
naturalization that was about to engulf them.

Consciousness

In Locke’s actual view of personal identity, as opposed to the one most of his
critics attributed to him, consciousness is more inclusive than memory; it is,
he said, ‘inseparable from thinking’ and ‘essential to it: It being impossible for
any one to perceive, without perceiving that he does perceive’. Locke added
that ‘When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we
know that we do so’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.9;335). It is in, and by, knowing that we
‘do so’, that is, that we perform one of these typically first-order mental
operations, that we are conscious. Hence, consciousness is any sort of reflexive
awareness (or reflexive knowledge).

It is an implication of this view of consciousness that when you remember

having had an experience or having performed an action, a reflexivity is involved
which is similar to that which is involved when you are merely aware that, in
the present, you are having an experience or performing an action. But in the
case of memory, it would seem, the reflexivity happens twice over. That is,

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

when you remember having had the experience, say, of being anxious, you are
aware that it is you who, in the present, is having the experience of remembering
and also that it was you who, in the past, had the experience of being anxious.

In other words, in Locke’s view, if right now you are remembering having

experienced being anxious, you are not just aware that an experience of being
anxious occurred, you are also aware that it was you who had the experience;
that is, an ingredient of your remembering of ‘the having of an experience’
is that it was you who had it. Thereby, you appropriate (claim ownership of)
the having of the experience. It is as if you were to claim of the experience
remembered, ‘That was mine’ and of the current having of the memory
experience, ‘And this too is mine’. Of course, normally you do not explicitly
claim ownership of either experience; rather, your double claim of ownership
is implicit in your remembering having had the original experience.

In adopting from Descartes this view of the self-reflexive nature of

consciousness and then wedding it to his own memory analysis of personal
identity over time, Locke himself, in effect, originated that objection to the
memory analysis for which Bishop Butler is famous but which had surfaced
earlier in criticisms of Locke by John Sergeant and Samuel Clarke.

The

objection is that one cannot analyze personal identity non-circularly in terms
of memory because the notion of memory includes the notion of personal
identity. That Locke was aware of this, indeed that in his unquestioning,
explicit, and up-front commitment to the view that all consciousness is
reflexive, he all but insisted on the point, is evidence that, contrary to what is
often said, he was not, in fact, trying to analyze personal identity non-
circularly in terms of memory.

Locke’s objectives were different. Primary among them were his

developing an account of personal identity that would satisfy two criteria:
first, persons had to be capable of persisting through change of substance (or
else it would be impossible to determine observationally whether an individual
remained the same person over time, and post-mortem persons might not be
identifiable with anyone who had lived on Earth); and, second, persons had
to be accountable for their thoughts and deeds and, hence, appropriate subjects
for the just distribution of rewards and punishments (or else the Christian
dogmas of the resurrection and divine judgment would not make sense). These
objectives were thrust upon Locke by his epistemology and his religious
convictions. That is, since Locke was officially agnostic about the soul, the
fate of persons could not be tied to that of souls; since he accepted that people
survive their bodily deaths and that subsequently they are either justly
rewarded or punished for what they had done prior to bodily death the fate of
persons could not, then, be tied to material bodies (since after bodily death
people may not have them, or at least may not have the same ones they had
prior to bodily death); and persons, in Locke’s view, had to be entities which
after bodily death could be rewarded or punished justly for deeds performed
before bodily death.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

What sort of entity could possibly satisfy such criteria? Only one that could

span the migration from being constituted, prior to bodily death, just of matter,
to being constituted, after bodily death, of matter or spirit, or both; and only
one so linked throughout its duration to its earlier phases that it is transparently
accountable for the thoughts and deeds of its earlier phases. To show that there
is such an entity, or at least that there is one prior to bodily death, Locke had to
show how persons originate in the process of normal human development. And
to show how persons could have originated, he had to show how consciousness
could unify a person both over time and at a time, regardless of whether there
was a change in the person’s underlying substance. Locke did this by explaining
how persons are by-products of the development in at least normal humans of
reflexive consciousness.

Humans and persons

Locke distinguished between humans and persons in the first place for two
reasons: first, he thought that we have different ideas of man (= human) and
person and, so, need different identity conditions for them. In saying that we
have different ideas of human and person, Locke was not making a point about
ordinary language.

In commenting on his prince and cobbler example, in which

overnight the ‘souls’ (= minds) of a prince and cobbler switch bodies, Locke
admitted that ‘in the ordinary way of speaking, the same Person, and the same
Man, stand for one and the same thing’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.15;340). Locke’s point,
rather, was that there is one idea corresponding to what he wants to understand
by man and another corresponding to what he wants to understand by person.
The word man, when it corresponds to Locke’s idea of man, is what we might
call a scientific term. It means, or refers to, a certain biological kind. We assume
that individual humans are instances of this kind. The word, person, on the
other hand, when it corresponds to Locke’s idea of person, is, he says, ‘a
Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to
intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery’ (Ibid.:
II.xxvii.26;346). What that forensic term means is a separate question, to which
we shall return.

Whether Locke thought persons were substances and, if so, how and why,

are questions that have been discussed endlessly by commentators.

In our

opinion, it is impossible to determine what Locke’s views on the status of
persons as substances actually were. But for present purposes, it does not really
matter. What matters, rather, is that as Locke was interpreted by some of his
most famous critics and followers, persons, as he accounts for them, could not
be genuine substances. Rather, since the nominal essence of person is based
on a mode, persons, as we might say, are merely virtual (that is, fictional)
substances. In saying of a putative substance that it is virtual, rather than real,
we mean, first, that, it is not a substance and, second, that for pragmatic reasons
one nevertheless continues to speak of it as if it were a substance.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

A second reason Locke distinguished between humans and persons has to

do with survival and accountability. As already noted, he was interested that
his theory of persons somehow reflect or express the circumstances under
which humans should be held responsible for their thoughts and deeds; and
he was interested in framing a theory of human and personal identity that
would be adequate to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. Although
Locke never said so explicitly, his principal worry in connection with the
doctrine of the resurrection may well have been that it is implausible to
suppose that the same humans who acted on Earth will, on the Day of
Judgment, be available to be judged. The reasons Locke may have thought
this are, first, that there cannot be more than one beginning to a thing, second,
that we do not know whether humans have immaterial souls, and, third, that
humans obviously decompose soon after their bodily deaths, the material of
which they are made becoming parts of other entities.

In Locke’s day, many thinkers believed that the matter out of which (some

phase or other of) one’s body was composed on Earth would be reassembled
in the afterlife. But to Locke, this proposal may have been objectionably
speculative. And unless one’s body were reassembled immediately, bodily
continuity, and perhaps also one’s persistence as a human, has been broken.
Persons, as Locke proposed that we conceive of them, are free of such
obstacles to their potential survival. Yet, to make the trick work, persons
have to be connected to their associated humans closely enough and in the
right ways so as to make persons appropriate recipients of Divine rewards
and punishments.

Persons and selves

Locke’s idea of person may be the same as his idea of self. Sometimes he
uses the words interchangeably. However, often he seems to use self to refer
to a momentary entity and person to refer to a temporally extended one. And,
seemingly for other reasons, he defines the two terms differently. A person,
he says, ‘is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and
can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and
places’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.9;335). A self, on the other hand ‘is that conscious
thinking thing, (whatever Substance, made up of whether Spiritual, or
Material, Simple, or Compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or
conscious of Pleasure and Pain, capable of Happiness or Misery, and so is
concern’d for it self, as far as that consciousness extends’ (Ibid.:
II.xxvii.17;341). There are important differences, at least in emphasis,
between these two definitions. Locke’s definition of person highlights that
persons are thinkers and, as such, have reason, reflection, intelligence, and
whatever else may be required for trans-temporal self-reference. His definition
of self, on the other hand, highlights that selves are sensors and as such feel
pleasure and pain, and are capable of happiness, misery and self-concern.

PERSONAL IDENTITY

Such differences reflect disparate concerns that Locke expressed throughout

his discussion of personal identity. Primary among these are that persons be
appropriately subject both to moral and civil law and that they be things that
naturally constitute themselves. Locke’s concern that persons be appropriately
subject to law raises the possibility that persons might simply be artifacts of
theory—like legal property, or legal persons (where, say, corpor-ations count
as persons); however, his concern that persons be things that naturally constitute
themselves counts against the idea that persons are merely creatures of theory.
It is debatable how this tension in Locke’s theory should be resolved.

The origin of selves

We know how, in Locke’s view, humans come into being. It is a biological
process. How do selves (or persons) come into being? It would seem, in some
such way as this: first, a human organism’s experience of pleasure and pain
gives rise to the idea of a self—its own self—that is the experiencer of pleasure
and pain. Second, a human organism’s experience of pleasure and pain also
gives rise to concern with the quality of that self’s experience (each of us wants
more pleasure, less pain). In thus constituting itself as a self, the organism, in
effect, creates what initially is ‘a momentary self’. In creating this self, the
organism does not create any new matter or spirit. Third, the momentary self
thus constituted (or perhaps the organism) thinks of itself (or its self) as extended
over brief periods of time (say, the specious present). Then, through memory
and the appropriation ingredient in self-consciousness, it thinks of itself as
extended over longer periods of time:

This personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is
past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and
accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions, just upon the
same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present. All
which is founded in a concern for Happiness, the unavoidable con-
comitant of consciousness, that which is conscious of Pleasure and
Pain, desiring, that that self, that is conscious, should be happy.
And therefore whatever past Actions it cannot reconcile or
appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more
concerned in, than if they had never been done.

(Ibid.: II.xxvii.26;346)

Thus, Locke thought of the constitution of the self as an ordered, multi-step

process. It is unclear, however, whether he thought of this process as one in
which prior phases temporally preceded subsequent phases. While he seems to
have thought this, as evidenced by the quotation above, it is possible that he
thought of selves (or persons) as significantly temporally extended from their
inception.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Whatever Locke’s view, if any, on this issue, he clearly seems to have thought

that the self (or, the organism) appropriates on behalf of itself (or, its self) not
only whatever it is in it that does its thinking (he is agnostic about what this is)
but also, in so far as the self (or, the organism) is conscious of them: pleasures,
pains, bodily parts and actions, both current and past. And he thought that the
self (or, the organism) does this appropriating not in a separate mental act but,
rather, as an integral part of what is involved simply in being conscious.

In sum, according to Locke, the original motive for self-constitution is provided

by pleasure and pain. In normal humans, at least, these arouse ‘concernment’
and the assignment of the pleasure or pain to a self, which then is, or soon becomes,
one’s own self. If we think of this concernment and assignment as the ‘glue’ in
self-constitution, then what gets glued together, are, first, whatever it is in the
human organism that is conscious; second, mental states; third, actions; and,
fourth, non-conscious bodily parts. Via consciousness, first, of present experiences
and actions and, second, of memories of past ones, the ultimate product of this
gluing together of disparate elements is the temporally extended self.

There is an analogous account to be given of how one should understand

Locke on the topic of the origins of reflexive consciousness. One might say that
when a human organism becomes aware (of something), necessarily it is also
aware that it, the human organism, is aware. Or, instead, one might say that
when a human organism becomes aware (of something), necessarily the self,
whose organism it is, is also aware that it, that is, the self, is aware. For example,
in Locke’s view, if right now you are experiencing anxiety or intellectual
puzzlement, or lust, you are not just aware that an experience of anxiety,
puzzlement, or lust, is occurring, you are also aware that you are having the
experience. That is, it is an ingredient of your awareness that an experience is
occurring and that the experience is yours. And in having that awareness you
thereby appropriate (declare ownership of) the experience, as if you were to
claim of the experience, ‘This too is part of me’.

But, what in such a (typically implicit) claim is the referent of the word me?

The referent might be you, the human organism, or you, the self, or both. One
possibility is that, in claiming ownership of experience through reflexive self-
consciousness, you, the human organism, elevate yourself above the status of
human organism, in the process creating yourself as a person. That is, when the
organism says implicitly, ‘This too is part of me’, the me is not the human organism
but the person whose human organism it is. On such an interpretation, ‘This too
is part of me’ would, in effect, be equivalent to ‘This too is part of the self that is
myself and that owns this human organism’.

Mental development

In Locke’s day, thinkers tended in their theories to overlook that people develop
mentally. Included in this development is, that over time, people acquire
progressively more sophisticated concepts and also that the functioning of those

PERSONAL IDENTITY

parts of their brains or minds, that is, their so-called ‘faculties’, which operate
on their concepts, mature. In modern times, it was not until the last quarter of the
eighteenth century that the idea of such mental development began to take hold.
Rousseau and Locke, however, were partial exceptions to the rule, perhaps because
both of them were interested in education. And in holding that the mind at birth
is a tabula rasa, Locke had an additional motive for attending to mental
development. Thus, there are intimations throughout the Essay that, in Locke’s
view, over time people acquire progressively more sophisticated ideas and
principles. For example, ‘The Senses at first let in particular Ideas, and furnish
the yet empty Cabinet: And the Mind by degrees growing familiar with some of
them, they are lodged in the Memory, and Names got to them’. ‘Afterwards’
Locke continues, ‘the Mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by Degrees
learns the use of general Names. In this manner the Mind comes to be furnish’d
with Ideas and Language, the Materials about which to exercise its discursive
Faculty: And the use of Reason becomes daily more visible’, and so on (Ibid.:
I.ii.15;55, emphasis added).

There are also in the Essay indications that, those parts of peoples’ brains or

minds which operate on their concepts, that is, their ‘faculties’ of thinking,
function over time in progressively more sophisticated ways. For example, Locke
says of the ‘soul’ that ‘it comes, by Exercise, to improve its Faculty of thinking
in the several parts of it, as well as afterwards, by compounding those Ideas, and
reflecting on its own Operations, it increases its Stock as well as Facility in
remembering, imagining, reasoning, and other modes of thinking’ (Ibid.:
II.1.20;116). And, somewhat more ambiguously, he says, ‘These, I think, are the
first Faculties and Operations of the Mind, which it makes use of in Understanding;
…several of these Faculties being exercised at first principally about simple Ideas,
we might, by following Nature in its ordinary method, trace and discover them
in their rise, progress, and gradual improvements’ (Ibid.: II.xi.14;161, emphasis
added).

Although the point is debatable, it seems to us that in the last quoted

sentence Locke intended that the word them refer to faculties, rather than Ideas.

Appropriation and accountability

While Locke’s views on mental development are likely to remain murky, he
clearly thought that appropriation and accountability go hand in hand. His
view was that a person is ‘justly accountable for any Action’ just if it is
appropriated to that person by their self-consciousness (Ibid.: II.xxvii.16; 341).
It is via this view of his that the appropriation ingredient in reflexive self-
consciousness, which is a natural relation between the organism and her present
and past, becomes the basis for a non-natural relation of moral ownership.
That is, it is primarily this view—not any vague association between
consciousness and conscience, or equivocation on the notion of ownership—
that connects the natural appropriation that is part of human psychology with
the non-natural appropriation that is the concern of both ethics and the law.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Why did Locke think that appropriation and accountability go hand in hand?

There is an admittedly speculative but still, we think, plausible reason why
Locke might have thought this. He might have thought that, analogous to the
way in which people come under the rule of their government by constituting
themselves as a body-politic, and hence accepting civil responsibility for what
they do, humans become subject to ethical norms by constituting themselves
as persons and hence accepting ethical responsibility for what they do. That is
to say, humans, merely by virtue of being alive, and, hence, by virtue of being
humans, do not, as it were, accept accountability for their pasts. But humans
(or, persons) do accept accountability for their pasts, or at least for those parts
of their pasts that they remember, when, through consciousness, they declare
ownership of the various parts that collectively constitute themselves.

Are persons genuine or only virtual substances?

One of the most puzzling aspects of Locke’s account of personal identity is
that of determining his view of the ontological status of persons. There are two
aspects to the puzzle. One is that of determining his view of the status of humans,
the other that of determining his view of the status of persons. Many
commentators assume that there is only one puzzle; that is, they assume that
humans are substances, and the puzzle is that of determining whether persons
are also substances. However, there is some reason to believe that in Book II,
Chapter 27 Locke may have used the term substance in a more restricted way
than he did in the rest of the Essay.

In this more restricted sense of substance,

only God, immaterial thinking things, and individual atoms would be particular
substances. Cohesive collections of atoms—a lump of gold—would be
collective substances. Other things that Locke elsewhere speaks of, in a more
expansive sense of substance, as particular substances—oak trees, horses and
persons—are, in this more restricted sense of substance, not substances at all
but, rather, particular mixed modes, that is, functional organizations of particular
substances. If this interpretation is correct, then Locke was at least ambivalent
about the substantial status of living things, including humans, and perhaps
also of such inanimate but macroscopic objects as rocks and chairs.

Elsewhere, however, Locke talks of living things as if they were substances.

But it is never clear whether he means by such talk that they are substances in
the same primary way as ‘Particles of Matter’ are substances or, rather, that
they are substances only in some second-class way and, hence, strictly speaking
not really substances at all. Whatever Locke’s intention, he laid the groundwork
for others to claim that selves are not really substances. As we shall see, this
became a major issue among subsequent eighteenth century thinkers. However,
even though Locke, perhaps unintentionally, encouraged the view that the self
is a fiction, he certainly did not mean to encourage the view that the self is
created explicitly by the philosopher, for purposes of ethical theory, or by
judicial thinkers, for purposes of law. Rather, in Locke’s view, whether or not

PERSONAL IDENTITY

the self is a fiction it is created implicitly by human mentality, via processes of
appropriation and the application of self-concepts that are ingredient in reflexive
consciousness.

Real and nominal essences

In Locke’s view, we do not sort substances on the basis of their real constitutions,
which are unknown but, rather, on the basis of our ideas of them, which are
derived from gross sensible appearances. That is, we sort substances on the
basis of their nominal, rather than their real, essences. Because of this Locke
doubts whether the ways we ordinarily sort among substances are appropriate.
He says, for instance, that our ideas of substances are ‘inadequate’ because
they are referred to unknown ‘patterns’ (Ibid.: II.xxxi.3; 377). He is not skeptical
just of the ways in which ordinary people sort among substances, but is almost
as skeptical of the ways in which scientists do so. He says, for instance, that
‘Chymists’ often discover ‘by sad experience’ that things supposedly of the
same sort are more different from each other than they are from things
supposedly of different sorts (Ibid.: III.vi.8;443). And ‘our faculties carry us
no farther towards the knowledge and distinction of Substances, than a
Collection of those sensible Ideas, which we observe in them; which however
made with the greatest diligence and exactness, we are capable of, yet is more
remote from the true internal Constitution, from which those Qualities flow,
than, as I said, a Countryman’s Idea is from the inward contrivance of that
famous Clock at Strasburg whereof he only sees the outward Figure and
Motions’. Locke continues: There is not so contemptible a Plant or Animal,
that does not confound the most inlarged Understanding. Though the familiar
use of Things about us, take off our Wonder; yet it cures not our Ignorance’
(Ibid.: III.vi.9;444). His skepticism extends also to ‘Spirits’: ‘For the Mind
getting, only by reflecting on its own Operations, those simple Ideas which it
attributes to Spirits, it hath, or can have no other Notion of Spirit, but by
attributing all those Operations, it finds in it self, to a sort of Beings, without
Consideration of Matter’ (Ibid.: III.vi.11;445). Apparently, the worry in such
remarks is that, for all we know, ‘Spirits’ might just consist of matter. And
since we form our ideas of Spirits introspectively, without regard to their
possible material constitution, the nominal essences we attribute to Spirits may
be far removed from their real essences. This problem is compounded, Locke
thought, by the fact that while in our ideas we make sharp distinctions among
kinds of things, nature is gradual: ‘[W]e shall find every-where, that the several
Species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees’ (Ibid.:
III.vi.12;447).

Then, after talking about several different actual individuals or sorts of

individuals, whose status as humans is questionable, he said: ‘Wherein, then,
would I gladly know, consists the precise and unmovable Boundaries of that
Species [that is, “Man”]? ’Tis plain, if we examine, there is no such thing

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

made by Nature, and established by Her amongst Men’ (Ibid.: III.vi.27;454).

As a consequence, Locke thought, there may well, in a certain respect, be fewer
substances in nature than we think there are:

If therefore, any one will think, that a Man, and a Horse, and an
Animal, and a Plant, etc. are distinguished by real Essences made
by Nature, he must think Nature to be very liberal of these real
Essences, making one for Body, another for Animal, and another
for a Horse; and all these Essences liberally bestowed upon
Bucephalus. But if we would rightly consider…we should find,
that there is no new Thing made, but only more or less
comprehensive signs whereby we may be enabled to express, in a
few syllables, great numbers of particular Things, as they agree in
more or less general conceptions, which we have framed to that
purpose.

(Ibid.: III.vi.32;460)

So, it is not just a matter of fuzzy boundaries between sorts of things but also
of their not being any real things of those sorts in the first place; instead, there
are only, as it were, fictions (‘more or less comprehensive signs’), which people
make for the purpose of ‘convenience’ (Ibid.: III.vi.36;462).

Pathologies of memory

As Locke’s critics saw, in his analysis of personal identity there is a problem
about his use of the notion of memory. Ironically, though, there is a problem
not primarily, as they tended to think, because memory is useless for the purpose
of providing a non-circular analysis (or definition) of personal identity but for
two other reasons. One of these has to do with forgetfulness, the other with
delusions of memory. Locke responded to both problems. However, his
responses seem incompatible with his theory of personal identity and, hence,
constitute an embarrassment to virtually every interpretation of his theory.

Consider, first, the case in which people are (forgetfully) not conscious of

having done things they did do. There are three parts to Locke’s response to
this seeming possibility. First, he denied that people who are awake and thinking
about it ever are not conscious of having done anything they did do since if
they are not conscious of having done something, they did not do it. In making
this point, Locke first recounted that someone he knew thought he had Socrates’
soul. Locke then considered the analogous case of someone who thinks he has
the soul either of Nestor or Thersites. Locke asked rhetoric-ally, ‘Now having
no consciousness of any of the Actions either of Nestor or Thersites, does, or
can he, conceive himself the same Person with either of them? Can he be
concerned in either of their Actions? Attribute them to himself, or think them
his own more than the Actions of any other Man, that ever existed?’ (Ibid.:

PERSONAL IDENTITY

II.xxvii.14;339). The answer, which Locke apparently thought is too obvious
to need saying, is, no. Locke continued, ‘But let him [someone who claims to
be Nestor] once find himself conscious of any of the Actions of Nestor, he then
finds himself the same Person with Nestor’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.14;340). By
implication, we think, Locke also must have been saying of the person he knows
who claims to have Socrates’ soul, that whatever he might say he thinks, he
does not really think he is Socrates, since if he did think that, he would be
‘concerned’ in the actions of Socrates, that is, he would own them and hold
himself accountable for them, and he does not own them or hold himself
accountable for them. Locke’s point, then, may have been that if the person in
question thinks he is concerned in the actions of Socrates, he is deceiving
himself.

If this was Locke’s point, then far from its being a blunder or symptom of

incoherence in his view, as commentators often suppose, it is quite insightful.
For what Locke was saying is that whether we appropriate the actions of
someone in the past is not a matter of what theories we may have about who
we are but, rather, of the nature of our experience. In other words, Locke was
making two points: first, that our appropriating the experiences and actions of
someone in the past depends on our being actually concerned, in the right way,
with those experiences and actions, and not on whether we think we are that
person or even on whether we think we are concerned in the right way with
that person’s experiences and actions; and, second, that whether we are actually
concerned, in the right way, with someone’s past experiences and actions is
determined by our phenomenology.

And what sort of phenomenologically expressed concernment is the right

sort of concernment to forge identity between ourselves and people who lived
in the past? Why, of course, the sort of concernment that is ingredient in reflexive
self-consciousness. And, in order to have that sort of concernment, Locke is
saying, at least normally, if not always, I must remember in a first-personal
way, that is, ‘from the inside’, the having of the experiences of someone in the
past and the performing of his actions. If I do that, Locke thought, then I not
only remember, say, the having of the experiences, but I remember that I had
them, and in remembering that I had them, I appropriate—that is, declare
ownership of—them. It is such acts of appropriation, not any theory I may
have about who I am or what I am concerned about, that makes the previous
experiences and actions mine.

The second part of Locke’s response to the possibility that some people

may not be conscious of having done things they did do was to the supposition
that he might wholly lose all memories of some parts of his life, with no
possibility of retrieving them. ‘Yet’, Locke asked, ‘am I not the same person,
that did those Actions, had those Thoughts, that I was once conscious of, though
I have now forgot them?’ His answer was that ‘we must here take notice what
the Word I is applied to, which in this case is the Man only’. Locke conceded
that since, in common language, the man is presumed to be the person, ‘I is

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

easily here supposed to stand also for the same Person’. But, he continued, ‘if
it be possible for the same Man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness
[sic] at different times, it is past doubt the same Man would at different times
make different Persons’. Locke said that what he is suggesting here is in accord
with ‘the Sense of Mankind in the solemnest Declaration of their Opinions,
Humane Laws not punishing the Mad Man for the Sober Man’s Actions, nor
the Sober Man for what the Mad Man did, thereby making them two Persons’.
He also cited in support of his view ‘our way of speaking in English, when we
say such an one is not himself, or is besides himself; in which Phrases it is
insinuated, as if those who now, or, at least, first used them, thought, that self
was changed, the self same Person was no longer in that Man’ (Ibid.:
II.xxvii.20;342–3). On a charitable reading, Locke’s point here, seemingly
about ambiguous self-reference, is just his way of saying that while the man
performed the actions, the person, who now does not remember having
performed them, did not.

The final part of Locke’s answer to the problem that some people may not

be conscious of having done something they did is that, if it serves Justice,
then eventually they will be conscious of it ‘when every one shall receive
according to his doing’ and ‘the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open’ (Ibid.:
II.xxvii.26; 347). There is an obvious problem with this answer. In so far as
reward and punishment is accorded to a person only for what the person does,
and God on the day of judgment arranges it so that a person is conscious of
everything he does, then there must be some standard by which God determines
what a person has done other than that of what the person is conscious of
having done. Many commentators think that here also Locke lapses into
irretrievable incoherence. However, Locke may here simply be betraying the
fact that except for a benign skepticism, he is indifferent to mundane
metaphysics. He did not think that we can know the real essences of any
substances, either persons or anything else. But he also did not think that it
matters. At least he did not think that it matters for the practical conduct of our
lives, which for Locke was all that really matters. And, as we shall see in more
detail when we consider his response to the next pathology of memory to be
considered, one of the reasons that Locke was relatively unconcerned about
whether he got the metaphysics right was his belief that if he were to get it
wrong, God would set it right (Ibid.: I.i.5;45).

Consider next, people who are (delusionally) conscious of having done things

they did not do. Locke’s answer to the problem of ‘delusions of identity’ is in
two parts. He began by conceding that, without bringing theology into the
picture, there is no way to know that delusions of identity do not occur: ‘[W]hy
one intellectual Substance may not have represented to it, as done by it self,
what it never did, and was perhaps done by some other Agent, why I say such
a representation may not possibly be without reality of Matter of Fact, as well
as several representations in Dreams are, which yet, whilst dreaming, we take
for true, will be difficult to conclude from the Nature of things’. Then, Locke

PERSONAL IDENTITY

brought theology into the picture: ‘And that it [such delusions] never is so,
will by us, till we have clearer views of the Nature of thinking Substances be
best resolv’d into the Goodness of God, who as far as the Happiness or Misery
of any of his sensible Creatures is concerned in it, will not by a fatal Error of
theirs transfer from one to another, that consciousness, which draws Reward
or Punishment with it’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.13;338). So, in effect, Locke, first,
conceded that temporarily and on Earth delusions of identity may occur but,
then, denied that in the final analysis there will be any. This would seem to be
a problem for Locke, since the view of personal identity he had been developing
seems to leave no room for delusions of identity. From Locke’s point of view,
we suspect, it was much less of a problem.

In our view, to a greater degree than is usually acknowledged by

commentators, Locke, in the Essay, was a ‘theological pragmatist’, that is, a
pragmatist for whom other-worldly consequences were paramount. Surprising
as it may seem, with the exception of three theses—that God exists, that the
Self exists, and that there is an external world with the power to cause our
ideas of it— Locke was not nearly as interested in positive metaphysics as he
is usually portrayed as having been. He had a negative interest in metaphysics
that grew out of his desire to set strict limits on the possibilities of human
knowledge. And he had a positive interest in establishing theological
pragmatism. But except for a few views about the details of corpuscular
mechanism, that is about it. Recognizing this becomes important in
understanding Locke’s response to the problem of forgetfulness.

As a theological pragmatist, Locke’s attitude toward problems to his theory

of personal identity posed by faulty memory may well have been this: Based
on what we (humans) know, the view I (Locke) am expounding is at least as
reasonable as any competing view; perhaps even it is the most reasonable view.
However, there is no way to know whether it is the true view. On the day of
judgment, God will judge on the basis of the true view. While we do not know
what that view will be, we know it will be close enough to maximally reasonable
views that our view will have been an adequate basis for conduct. Otherwise
God would be a deceiver, and God is not a deceiver. And, insofar as personal
identity (or anything else) is concerned, all we really need to know is that our
view is an adequate basis for conduct.

FISSION

In our own times, the introduction of fission examples into the personal identity
debate provoked a fierce controversy, still raging, over the seemingly new
question of whether personal identity is what matters primarily in survival.

Chapter 6, we return briefly to this contemporary controversy. In the present
chapter, we want to consider the first half of a curious phenomenon. It is that
neither fission examples nor the recognition of their importance to the question
of what matters in survival are late twentieth century discoveries.

Throughout

the eighteenth century, personal identity theorists were aware of fission
examples. By the end of the century, Priestley had raised the ‘new question’
about personal identity’s importance, and may even have suggested in response
to it that personal identity is not what matters primarily in survival. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt, using fission examples, suggested
that the distinction between self and other is not nearly as important as had
traditionally been supposed. Then, hard as it may be to believe, throughout the
rest of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, the discussion of
fission examples and their implications for personal identity theory fell almost
(but not completely) out of sight! In the present chapter, our story is about how
fission first came into view. As usual, we begin with Locke.

Locke on unity of consciousness

In his chapter on identity, Locke was preoccupied with the implications of
fission-like examples: ‘Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable
consciousnesses acting the same Body, the one constantly by Day, the other by
Night; and on the other side the same consciousness, acting by Intervals two
distinct Bodies’. Regarding these, Locke said, ‘I ask in the first case, Whether
the Day- and the Night-man would not be two as distinct Persons, as Socrates
and Plato; and whether in the second case, there would not be one Person in
two distinct Bodies, as much as one Man is the same in two distinct clothings’
(Locke 1975:II.xxvii.23;344).

The first of these examples, the day/night case, is like a case of multiple

personality disorder with amnesiac barriers between the personas; there are

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two consciousnesses in one body and these consciousnesses are
‘incommunicable’ (i.e., not co-conscious). In Locke’s view, the day-person
and night-person, in spite of their sharing the same body, are different people.

In the second example, one consciousness is in two bodies. Locke’s use of

the expression, ‘acting by intervals’ suggests that he meant that the
consciousness was first in one body and then in the other, but never in both at
the same time. If this is what he meant, then neither of these examples is a
genuine fission example since neither involves (i) one consciousness dividing
into two, each of which is then (ii) continuous with the original, (iii) con-
temporaneous with the other, and yet (iv) independent of the other. Unless all
four of these conditions are satisfied, as they are only in what we are calling
genuine fission examples, one lacks a compelling motive to regard fission-
descendants as different people from each other, and to regard the original
person as different from each of the fission-descendants.

In a third example, Locke said, ‘It must be allowed, That if the same

consciousness’ can be ‘transferr’d from one thinking Substance to another it
will be possible, that two thinking Substances may make but one Person. For
the same consciousness being preserv’d, whether in the same or different
Substances, the personal Identity is preserv’d’ (Ibid.: II.xxvii.13;338). It is
unclear whether Locke here was considering the possibility of the same
consciousness being transferred first to one thinking substance and then to
another, but never to both at once, or whether he was considering the possibility
of its being transferred at the same time to two independently conscious thinking
substances. Only in the latter case would he have presented what we are calling
a genuine fission example.

Locke then went on to consider a case in which one’s little finger is cut off

and consciousness, rather than staying with the main part of the body, goes
with the little finger. He concludes, ‘Upon separation of this little Finger, should
this consciousness go along with the little Finger, and leave the rest of the
Body, ’tis evident the little Finger would be the Person, the same Person; and
self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the Body’. In the section
immediately following, Locke returns to this example, at least amplifying it
and possibly turning it into a case of what we are calling a genuine fission
example: ‘Though if the same Body should still live, and immediately from
the separation of the little Finger have its own peculiar consciousness, whereof
the little Finger knew nothing, it would not at all be concerned for it, as a part
of it self, or could own any of its Actions, or have any of them imputed to him’
(Ibid.: II.xxvii.18;342). In this version of the example, it is unclear what Locke
meant to be suggesting. One possibility is that he meant that the original
consciousness went with the finger and the rest of the body acquired a new
consciousness; another is that the original consciousness split into two parts,
one part in the finger and one in the rest of the body, each part a whole
consciousness qualitatively identical to the original. Although it is debatable
what Locke had in mind, the latter reading seems the more natural one to us.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

On it, Locke’s case is a genuine fission example, the first fission example to be
considered explicitly in the context of personal identity theory. Whatever he
may have had in mind, Locke did not explore the implications of his example.
But once he published his new theory, the fission-example cat was out of the
bag.

Disputes with Locke over the resurrection

In the Essay, Locke suggested diplomatically that it is highly probable that the
soul is an immaterial substance to which consciousness is annexed. He also
said that, in principle, God could have ‘superadded’ the power of thought to
matter. His advancing of this latter possibility together with his new theory of
personal identity provoked a storm of immediate criticism, to most of which
Locke refused to respond (in 1702, Catharine Trotter replied on his behalf to
Burnet’s extended critique).

However, Locke could not avoid an engagement

with Bishop Stillingfleet, who drew Locke into debate by linking his view
with Toland’s infamous, deist tract, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). From
1696 to 1698, there was an exchange of letters between Locke and Stillingfleet,
which on Locke’s side alone is half as long as the Essay! (Locke 1963:v.4).
Subsequently, some of the material in these letters was included in footnotes
to the fifth edition of the Essay, which was published after Locke’s death.

On the issue of the resurrection, Stillingfleet defended the traditional view

that to be resurrected one’s body must include the very matter it had at the end
of one’s life. Locke argued, first, that this view is incoherent and, then, that St.
Paul’s idea that the resurrected body could be composed of entirely new,
‘spiritualized’ matter is consistent with his own view. Late in the century,
Priestley, in defense of his materialistic view of the resurrection, would appeal
in a similar way to St. Paul. On the issue of thinking matter, Locke vigorously
defended the idea that thought—perhaps like life, sensibility, and even gravity
—could be ‘superadded’ to matter. Stillingfleet died before he could respond
to Locke’s third letter. Others soon entered the lists.

Isaac Watts was a dissenting minister whose philosophical, religious, and

literary works were much admired during the eighteenth century both in England
and America. He wrote several philosophical works that criticized Locke from
a Cartesian perspective, while also adopting several of Locke’s empirical and
logical methods. Like many others, Watts was more concerned over Locke’s
apparent tolerance of discontinuity than over whether the same matter would
be involved in the resurrection. Watts felt that any discontinuity whatsoever in
the thinking activity of the spirit or soul implied a cessation of existence, and
thus that any ‘resurrection’ after such a discontinuity was not a resurrection of
the same person, but rather the beginning of a new one. He conceded that God
could create such a new person with a consciousness qualitatively similar to
that of the old, but he thought that if such a newly created being ‘should suppose
itself to remember things done in a former state, before it had any existence’

FISSION

this ‘would be properly a false appre-hension, and error and not a real memory
of what was done before, and would lay no just foundation for the recompenses
of vice or virtue’ (Watts 1789:265–6). In making this point, Watts, in effect,
made the distinction between genuine and mere seeming memory that in our
own times, through Martin and Deutscher’s influential paper (1966), has been
used to support a physical criterion of personal identity.

Philip Doddridge, another dissenting minister, in lecture notes on personal

identity that would be used to teach the young Priestley at Daventry, sided
with Watts against Locke: ‘If God should utterly destroy the soul and body of
any man whom we know, and afterwards create a new spirit, united to a new
body, and in form resembling the other, and give to it the exact consciousness
of the man whose body and soul was destroyed, and should reveal to us what
he had done, we could not converse with this new produced man as the same
man we formerly knew, or approve that as an equitable conduct, by which he
should be rewarded or punished for the actions of the annihilated man’.
Doddridge concluded that ‘this abundantly shows the impropriety of Mr.
Locke’s manner of stating the question, and how much Dr. Watts’s is to be
preferred to it’ (Doddridge 1763:23–4, emphasis added). Doddridge here was
among the first to suggest that there is a social dimension to the question of
determining whether personal identity obtains, a point Priestley would also
use, but to different effect, in defence of his own alternative view.

Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins

Locke’s fission-like examples and his suggestions leaning towards an account
of persons as fictions had a remarkable development between 1706 and 1709
in a six-part debate between Clarke and Collins (Clarke 1738:v.3, 720–913).
By all indications this debate was widely known. It was reprinted twice (in
1731 and 1738) and throughout the century is referred to many times. In 1727,
a thirty-six page abridgement of the debate was published (Fox 1988:55, 69).

Clarke, Boyle Lecturer and ‘chief lieutenant of Newton’, was at the time

regarded by many as the most intelligent man of his era. Collins, a disciple of
Locke, was at the onset of the debate relatively unknown. His initial challenge
to Clarke was in response to Clarke’s attempt to establish the immortality of
the soul. Their exchange soon developed into a more general consideration of
personal identity and of whether matter can think. Clarke defended the
traditional view that consciousness could reside only in an immaterial substance,
Collins the new view that matter can think.

Surprisingly, perhaps, what we are calling genuine fission examples were

introduced into this debate not by Collins, as a way of developing Locke’s
view, but by Clarke, as a way of objecting to it. Subsequently fission examples
were discussed several times in the debate. The basic outline of Clarke’s overall
argument is simple. He assumed that consciousness is a real property, which,
in his sense of ‘real property’, implied that were consciousness to be a property

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

of a material system every part of the system would have to be conscious (Clarke
1738:730, 760). Such a result, he maintained, would be absurd. Collins
maintained that consciousness can emerge from properties of parts of the system
(or be ‘superadded’ by God to the system) even though the parts themselves
are not conscious.

In Clarke’s first reply to Collins, he asked Collins to suppose that ‘the

smallest imaginable Particle of Matter imbued with Consciousness or Thought’
has ‘by the Power of God’ been ‘divided into two distinct Parts’. Clarke then
asked, ‘What will naturally and consequently become of its Power of
Thinking?’:

If the Power of Thinking will remain only in One of the separated
Parts: then either That One Part only, had at first the Power residing
in it; and then the same Question will return, upon the Supposition
of Its being likewise divided; or else it will follow that one and the
same Individual Quality may be transferred from one Subject to
another; which all Philosophers of all Sects in the World, have
always confessed to be impossible. If, in the last place, it be said,
that upon the Division of the Particle, the Power of Thinking, which
was in it, will wholly cease; then it will follow, that That Power
was never at all a real Quality inhering or residing in the Substance,
(in which mere separation of Parts, makes no Alteration;) but that
it was merely an external Denomination, such as is Roundness in a
Globe, which perishes at its being divided: And this, I suppose,
will be granted to be sufficiently absurd.

(Ibid.: 761)

In such early passages, Clarke clearly had fission in mind, but he had not yet
directed his focus to its implications for personal identity.

In his Third Defense, Clarke introduced a fission example to show that

Collins’ attributing consciousness to material substances leads to a
contradiction. The ‘contradiction’ he had in mind arises from considering
consciousness as a real property and yet admitting that it can be separated
from the substance in which it inheres. Earlier Clarke had argued on general
metaphysical grounds that, even though all material substances transform
continuously into other substances by addition or subtraction of particles, it is
‘absurd’ to suppose that the same numerical property can be ‘transferred’ from
one substance to another. Now he argued that in attributing sameness of
consciousness over time to a material substance, Collins must really be
attributing it to a ‘flux’ of substances, which contradicts the assumption of a
real property’s inseparability from its substance (Ibid.: 787; see also 843).

Instead of denying Clarke’s assumption directly, Collins replied by

introducing memory as the faculty that guarantees the persistence of the same
consciousness and, hence, of the person (Ibid.: 809, 819–20). He suggested

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that the forgetting of past but distant actions can be understood by appeal to a
failure of transference in the brain since only if the recollection of past
experiences is transferred to new particles of the brain will memory for them
be retained. But, then, when such recollections are transferred and consciousness
of past actions is maintained, consciousness—and ultimately the person—
changes substances. His reply, thus, resulted in shifting the argument to personal
identity, and accordingly refocused Clarke’s objection.

Clarke initially replied that Collins’ account of transference is ‘an impossible

hypothesis’:

That the Person may still be the same, by a continual Superaddition
of the like Consciousness; notwithstanding the whole Substance
be changed: Then I say, you make individual Personality to be a
mere external imaginary Denomination, and nothing in reality: Just
as a Ship is called the same Ship, after the whole Substance is
changed by frequent Repairs; or a River is called the same River,
though the Water of it be every Day new…But he cannot be really
and truly the same Person, unless the same individual numerical
Consciousness can be transferred from one Subject to another. For,
the continued Addition or Exciting of a like Consciousness in the
new acquired Parts, after the Manner you suppose; is nothing but a
Deception and Delusion, under the Form of Memory; a making the
Man to seem himself to be conscious of having done that, which
really was not done by him, but by another.

(Ibid.: 844)

In other words, Clarke objected to Collins that if memory were able to guarantee
identity of persons, then persons would be fictional.

Clarke, then, introduced the idea of fission to hammer home the point that

such a sequence of like consciousnesses is not the same as a series of acts by a
single consciousness:

Such a Consciousness in a Man, whose Substance is wholly
changed, can no more make it Just and Equitable for such a Man to
be punished for an Action done by another Substance; than the
Addition of the like Consciousness (by the Power of God) to two
or more new created Men; or to any Number of Men now living, by
giving a like Modification to the Motion of the Spirits in the Brain
of each of them respectively; could make them All to be one and
the same individual Person, at the same time that they remain several
and distinct Persons; or make it just and reasonable for all and every
one of them to be punished for one and the same individual Action,
done by one only, or perhaps by none of them at all.

(Ibid.: 844–5)

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Collins’ view is thus shown to be contradictory because it would lead in this
imaginary fission-scenario to saying of two or more individuals both that they
are and also are not the same person.

Clarke, then, in a variation on his fission example, immediately emphasized

the resulting contradiction:

It is a Contradiction plain enough, to say that God’s impressing
permanently upon a Thousand Mens Minds, after the Manner of
the Representation of a Dream, the like Consciousness with that
which I find in my own Mind; would make every one of them, to
be, not Persons like me, but the same individual Person with myself.

(Ibid.: 845)

And then again, in the context of considering the resurrection:

If the same Person, after Annihilation, could, by restoring of the
same Consciousness, be created again; he might as possibly be
created again, by addition of the same Consciousness to new Matter,
even before Annihilation of the first: From whence it would follow,
that Two, or Two Hundred, several Persons, might All, by a
Superaddition of the like Consciousness, be one and the same
individual Person, at the same time that they remain several and
distinct Persons: It being as easy for God to add my Consciousness
to the new formed Matter of One or of One Hundred Bodies at this
present Time, as the Dust of my present Body at the Time of the
Resurrection. And no Reason can be given, why it would not be as
just at any time, to punish for my Faults a new created Man, to
whom my Consciousness is by the Power of God superadded: …This
inexplicable Confusion, wherewith your Doctrine perplexes the
Notion of personal Identity, upon which Identity the Justice of all
Reward and Punishment manifestly depends; makes the
Resurrection, in your way of arguing, to be inconceivable and
impossible.

(Ibid.: 852)

Nothing in what Clarke said suggests that he may have been thinking of the
fission-descendants in any of these examples as being co-conscious. Rather,
his examples support the charge of contradiction only if the descendants are
conceived to be, although replicas, distinct persons.

Collins’ reply leaves it unclear whether he understood the force of Clarke’s

examples:

I do allow that each of those Beings would be the same Person with
Mr. Clarke, that is, each of them would have a present

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Representation of the past Actions of Mr. Clarke… [Hence,] let
there be ever so many thinking Beings that have a present
Representation of a past Action, they can all constitute but one and
the same Person, because they all agree in, or have a present
Representation of the same past Action, wherein Self or personal
Identity consist.

(Ibid.: 877)

The emphasis in this passage is entirely on the agreement of present mental
representations in the replicas’ minds. So, it is an open question whether Collins
took Clarke’s view to be a case of genuine fission or instead one that involves
co-consciousness among the replicas.

The possibility that Collins here misinterpreted Clarke is heightened by an

analogy Collins drew between the replicas and the parts of a human body:

My consisting of even so great a Bulk of Matter, or even so many
distinct Beings, does not constitute different Persons, but constitutes
what we call Self, by the Sympathy and Concern I have for each
part united to me, though I have a distinct Act of Sensation for
each part that is at any time affected.

(Ibid.)

Later, however, in responding to problems posed for his view by the doctrine
of the resurrection, Collins appealed to the ‘Article of Christian Faith, that the
same numerical Particles that are laid in the Grave, shall be raised at the
Resurrection’ (Ibid.: 878, emphasis added).

In such passages, Collins took the problem for his view with having several

psychological replicas to be that the punishment of twenty distinct beings, all
having ‘present Representations of the same sinful Actions’ would make God’s
punishment unjust by making it to be ‘twenty times as much as the sinful Action
deserved’ (Ibid.). Strictly speaking, such worries as this one are compatible
with the hypothesis that Collins considered the replicas to be co-conscious—
the punishment might be twenty times greater because it is inflicted in full
measure on each of twenty bodily parts all of which are related to the same
consciousness. But such an interpretation is far-fetched. It is more plausible to
suppose that what Collins had in mind is that the injustice would result simply
from God’s bringing about a pain twenty times greater than was merited. This
simpler interpretation is also supported by the fact that Collins later explicitly
excluded, for moral reasons that again relied on his sense of justice, that God
could create ‘distinct thinking Beings, with each of them a Consciousness
extended to the same past Actions, and attributing them to themselves’ (Ibid.,
emphasis added).

In sum, Clarke provided genuine fission examples. Ironically, he also had a

view of the self according to which genuine fission is impossible. So, he

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

perceived the seeming possibility of genuine fission as an absurdity following
from relational accounts of identity. Also ironically, Collins, who had a view
of personal identity that allowed him to acknowledge fission as a real possibility,
may not have fully followed Clarke’s examples. In any case, because this debate
was well-known, both fission examples and the idea that they have implications
for personal identity theory of a sort Locke had not considered was brought to
the attention of eighteenth century theorists.

Henry Grove

From 1706 to 1738, Grove, a dissenting minister, taught at Taunton Academy,
one of many schools in England where progressive ideas were seriously and
sympathetically considered. Like Watts, who was a good friend and fellow
student, Grove was trained in Cartesian metaphysics. But Grove was intrigued
by Locke’s radical new ideas. Between 1710 and 1720, Grove corresponded
with Clarke and also published several essays on the immateriality and
immortality of the soul. For present purposes, however, his unpublished lectures
are of most interest. In them, he wrote:

For if consciousness [as Locke claimed] never fails of making
Personal Identity, it follows that several men may possibly become
ye same Person because tis possible they may all agree in an
obstinate Fancy that they did a certain action which in truth was
done by one of them; And for as much as Personal Identity is ye
foundation of Reward and Punishment may consistently with ye
strictest Justice be all punish’d for ye Crime of one. Mr. Lock must
be interpreted to own this consequence by resolving it into ye
goodness of God, as our Security that he will not annex the same
consciousness to different Agents and then make them all suffer
for but one individual action.

(Grove 1720:45)

Since Grove greatly admired Clarke he may, or may not, have gotten this idea
from reading the debate between Clarke and Collins. Wherever he got it, his
remarks illustrate how easily Locke’s critics came to the consideration of fission.

Scriblerus

Independently of such formal philosophical discussions, there are many
indications that early in the eighteenth century, fission-like examples were on
the minds of thinkers who were interested in the topic of personal identity.
Much of this interest, including quite a bit in the popular press, was stimulated
by Locke’s new account of personal identity (Fox 1988). But, surprisingly, in
Britain it was also nourished by a fascination with the phenomenon of Siamese

FISSION

twins. As early as 1694, Richard Burthogge had reported the phenomenon of
‘Child’ who had a double body, that is, ‘a double Breast and double Head, and
proper feelings of all parts’ (Burthogge 1694:264–5). In the summer of 1708,
Hungarian Siamese twin sisters toured Europe and captured the imagination of
London.

The twins phenomenon inspired a remarkable, humorous commentary of sorts

on Locke’s theory. Written around 1714, by members of the Scriblerus Club
(Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell,
Robert Harley, and perhaps others), The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works,
and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus revisits the topic of Siamese twins in the
context of a satirical critique of then current debates over the metaphysics of
soul, consciousness, and personal identity.

Toward the beginning, Scriblerus,

the hero of the story, seeks the location of the soul in the body, but cannot find it.
In his reflections on his search, the idea that there may be two persons in one
body arises. A later chapter rehearses, from Collins’ point of view, the debate
between Clarke and Collins over thinking matter. Several subsequent chapters
deal with Scriblerus’ falling in love with and marrying a pair of Siamese twins,
who share a single ‘organ of generation’. After this marriage, someone else marries
just one of the twins, and they all go to court. Scriblerus argues that the twins are
one person and share one soul since the organ of generation is obviously the
‘seat of the soul’. The other husband argues that in marrying the twins, and then
consummating his marriage, Scriblerus committed bigamy, as well as incest.
Several judges work out the solution, the result of which is that both marriages
are dissolved since ‘two persons [the explicit reference is to the husbands, but
must also playfully be to the twins] could not have a Right to the entire possession
of the same thing, at the same time’. Although not dealing with fission per se,
the identity problems associated with the case of these Siamese twins expresses
in concrete form a sort of puzzlement and amusement that Clarke and Collins
discussion of fission must have produced in sophisticated readers of their debate,
not the least the members of the Scriblerus Club. There is some evidence that the
Memoirs were widely read, not only for their humor, but also as philosophy.

Joseph Butler

We know that Butler was familiar with the debate between Clarke and Collins
because he twice noted it (Butler 1736:32, 321). Yet he never directly discussed
fission examples. As we shall see, he may have alluded to them. One of the
things he did do is to reassert the immaterial substance view of personal identity,
often merely repeating Clarke’s criticisms of relational views.

However, Butler’s

deft way of doing this suggests that with the possible exception of Clarke, he
saw more clearly than anyone else had yet seen what was radical in Locke’s
view. And Butler’s skillful articulation of this radical core in order to reject it
may have helped Hazlitt, who greatly admired Butler, to get clearer about which
aspects of this radical core he wanted to embrace.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Butler’s best known thought on personal identity is his criticism of the memory

analysis. Although he has gotten all the credit for seeing how Locke’s view might
be circular, the criticism itself had surfaced earlier, originally in remarks on
Locke’s view by John Sergeant, one of Locke’s earliest critics, who wrote that
‘Consciousness of any Action or any Accident we have now, or have had, is
nothing but our Knowledge that it belong’d to us’. He said it follows that ‘the
Man, or that Thing which is to be the Knower, must have had Individuality or
Personality from other Principles, antecedently to this Knowledge call’d
Consciousness; and consequently, he will retain his Identity, or continue the same
Man, or (which is equivalent) the same Person, as long as he has those
Individuating Principles’. Finally, he concluded that ‘a Man must be the same,
ere he can know or be Conscious that he is the same’ (Sergeant 1697: ref.14,
sec.12). A similar criticism is also clearly implicit in Clarke’s insistence, repeated
several times in his debate with Collins, that by consciousness Locke must mean:
‘That Consciousness by which I not only Remember that certain Things were
done many Years since but also am Conscious that they were done by Me, by the
very same Individual Conscious Being who now remembers them’ (Clarke 1738:
v.3, 787).

Immediately after making his own famous objection to the memory view,

Butler highlighted two other and, in our view, deeper issues for which he is not
well known. The issues are, first, that there are important links among identity,
responsibility, and self-concern and, second, that on a view such as Locke’s it is
questionable whether persons (or selves) would be real. Butler introduced these
issues by remarking that ‘the question’ is ‘whether the same rational being is the
same substance’, which, he said, ‘needs no answer because Being and Substance,
in this place, stand for the same idea. But, he continued, ‘the consciousness of
our own existence, in youth and in old age, or in any two joint successive moments,
is not the same individual action, i.e., not the same consciousness, but different
successive consciousnesses’. And, yet, ‘the person, of whose existence the
consciousness is felt now, and was felt an hour or a year ago, is discerned to be,
not two persons, but one and the same person; and therefore is one and the same’.
From this, he said, ‘it must follow’ on a view such as Locke’s, that:

it is a fallacy upon ourselves to charge our present selves with any
thing we did, or to imagine our present selves interested in any thing
which befell us yesterday; or that our present self will be interested
in what will befall us tomorrow; since our present self is not, in reality,
the same with the self of yesterday, but another like self or person
coming in its room, and mistaken for it; to which another self will
succeed tomorrow. This, I say, must follow: for if the self or person
of today, and that of tomorrow, are not the same, but only like persons
the person of today is really no more interested in what will befall
the person of tomorrow than in what will befall any other person.

(Butler 1736:320–2)

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Butler conceded that some may think he is misrepresenting Locke’s view since
‘those who maintain it allow that a person is the same as far back as his
remembrance reaches’. But, he claimed, the Lockeans, that is, Collins, whose
replies to Clarke are the basis of Butler’s assertions here, ‘cannot, consistently
with themselves, mean, that the person is really the same…but only that he is
so in a fictitious sense: in such a sense only as they assert, for this they do
assert, that any number of persons whatever may be the same person’ (Ibid.:
322, emphasis added). Yet, Butler insisted, a person or self ‘is not an idea, or
abstract notion, or quality, but a being only, which is capable of life and action,
of happiness and misery’, and, hence, definitely not a fiction (Ibid.: 323).

In sum, so far as Butler was concerned, on Locke’s account of personal

identity, our present selves would have no reason to be especially interested in
our past or future selves, and no one would have any reason to hold later selves
accountable for what earlier selves had done. Yet, in Butler’s view, regardless
of our philosophical views we must retain the language of self and person. So,
to maintain Locke’s view, we would have to consider ourselves to be selves
and persons not really but only in a fictitious sense. Butler thought such
consequences refute Locke’s view. But he thought this not because he thought
he could prove Locke’s view is false (he admitted he could not), but rather
because ‘the bare unfolding this notion [that selves are merely fictitious entities]
and laying it thus naked and open, seems the best confutation of it’ (Ibid.: 322,
325). Others, as we shall see, took a different view. What Butler made explicit
to motivate a retreat back from Locke’s view, Hazlitt, in particular, would make
explicit to recommend an advance beyond it.

David Hume

Hume said nothing on a whole host of issues regarding personal identity that
were being hotly debated at the time. In particular, he never discussed whether
he thought the relation that bound our present to our past selves was ‘sameness
of consciousness’, as Lockeans maintained, or something else (although, as
we shall see, since, among other reasons, we extend our identities beyond the
reach of our memories, Hume all but implied that it is not sameness of
consciousness). And Hume never discussed examples, such as Locke’s prince
and cobbler example, that might have shed light on his opinion about what the
relation is that binds earlier and later stages of a person. Seemingly he avoided
discussing such examples because he thought that all such relations were
fictitious and that questions about whether identity is preserved in such cases
are ‘merely verbal’. Yet, in his less skeptical, more realistic moments, such as
in most of Book 2 of the A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to have
subscribed to a relational view of the self. Needless to say, he never discussed
fission directly, and he had little to say, and nothing new, about how personal
identity might be analyzed in a way that links it to questions of accountability
and interestedness.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

However, in the context of pointing out that when distinct objects are related to a

common cause, we have a tendency to confuse ‘specific’ with ‘numerical identity’,
as may happen when we regard as the same continuing noise one ‘that is frequently
interrupted and renewed’ or as the same church one that burns down and then is
rebuilt, Hume said, ‘Where the objects are in their nature changeable and inconstant’;
in the case, say, of rivers changing their water, ‘we admit of a more sudden transition,
than wou’d otherwise be consistent with that relation’. In other words, we allow that
such objects persist, even though we would regard comparable changes in objects
that were not in their nature changeable and inconstant as bringing about their
cessation. It seems from Hume’s subsequent discussion of the church example that
he may have been aware of the special problems for judgments of identity that arise
in the case of fission. In claiming that, ‘without breach of the propriety of language’,
we might regard the two churches as the same church even if the first was of brick
and the second ‘of free-stone’, he added the caveat, ‘but we must observe, that in
these cases the first object is in manner annihilated before the second comes into
existence; by which means, we are never presented in any one point of time with the
idea of difference and multiplicity; and for that reason are less scrupulous in calling
them the same’ (Hume 1739:258). This is the closest that Hume comes to discussing
fission.

Hume claimed that the self is fictitious. In his view, since all reason or understanding

has to work with are diverse perceptions, it is the imagination that provides the links
upon which our conception of self is ultimately based, and yet we invariably create
the fiction that we are something more than just perceptions imaginatively linked:
‘For when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects,
our mistake is not confin’d to the expression but is commonly attended with a fiction,
either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and
inexplicable, or at least with a propensity to such fictions’ (Ibid.: 255). And further:
‘The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one, and of a
like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetable and animal bodies. It cannot,
therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the
imagination upon like objects’ (Ibid.: 259). Rather than considering the nature of
personal identity per se, Hume turned instead, and almost exclusively, to two other
questions: first, that of explaining how the fiction of identity arises, not only in the
case of persons but in that of anything which seems to persist over time and through
changes; and, second, the question of what role the fictional self plays in our emotions
and motivations. He thus shifted the emphasis from conceptually analyzing the notion
of personal identity to empirically accounting, first, for how it arises and, second, for
its functional role.

G.W.Leibniz

Leibniz had a great, though critical, admiration for Locke’s new theory of
personal identity and tried unsuccessfully to engage Locke in dialogue. Later,
Leibniz wrote New Essays Concerning Human Understanding. However, Locke

FISSION

died before the book was finished, so, out of respect for Locke, Leibniz decided
not to publish it. In 1765, long after Leibniz had died, New Essays finally
appeared. By then it was too late to have much impact on the debate over
Locke’s views (although from it Kant got the notion of ‘apperception’).

In New Essays, Leibniz discussed an example that is a curious mixture of

fission and fusion. Although this example never found a home in the ensuing
debate over personal identity, it found a different one, in our own times, in
Putnam’s externalist semantics:

It may be that in another place in the universe or at another time a
globe may be found which does not differ sensibly from this earthly
globe, in which we live, and that each of the men who inhabit it
does not differ sensibly from each of us who corresponds to him.
Thus there are at once more than a hundred million pairs of similar
persons, i.e., of two persons with the same appearances and
consciousnesses; and God might transfer spirits alone or with their
bodies from one globe to the other without their perceiving it; but
be they transferred or let alone, what will you say of their person or
self according to your authors? Are they two persons or the same
since the consciousness and the internal and external appearance
of the men of these globes cannot make the distinction? It is true
that God and the spirits capable of seeing the intervals and external
relations of times and places, and even internal constitutions,
insensible to the men of the two globes, could distinguish them;
but according to your hypotheses consciousness alone discerning
the persons without being obliged to trouble itself with the real
identity or diversity of the substance, or even of that which would
appear to others, how is it prevented from saying that these two
persons who are at the same time in these two similar globes, but
separated from each other by an inexpressible distance, are only
one and the same person; which is however, a manifest absurdity.

(Leibniz 1765:255–6)

In addition to Leibniz, others (Adam Smith is the premier example) also
explored the implications of fission-like examples of a sort that are beyond the
confines of the traditional personal identity debate. However, to pursue the
interesting uses to which such fission-like examples have been put would take us
too far afield.

Abraham Tucker

Currently, Tucker is not well known, but toward the end of the eighteenth century
he was a formidable figure. He claimed to be a Lockean but also had original
ideas that opposed those of Locke, including views on the unity of consciousness

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

and personal identity. He importantly influenced Paley’s theological utilitarianism
and he was a hero to Hazlitt, who in 1807 republished an abridged version of
Tucker’s seven volume, The Light of Nature Pursued (1768–77).

Like Clarke, Tucker argued for the simplicity and immateriality of the mind or

spirit based on its necessary unity and indivisibility, but in some ways Tucker’s
arguments are more sophisticated than Clarke’s and his overall position closer to
Kant’s. However, since Tucker held that our experienced unity of consciousness has
metaphysical implications for a numerical unity of spirit rather than for a synthetic
unity of consciousness, he stands at the end of one tradition rather than at the beginning
of another. He discussed personal identity and the unity of mind in two works: Man
in Quest of Himself (1763) and The Light of Nature Pursued (1768–77, III), in both
of which he insisted on the fact that the divisibility of matter implies a metaphysical
divisibility and that no system of matter could maintain unity of mind and numerical
identity of self.

In Man in Quest of Himself, Tucker pushed his materialist opponent to the position

that there must be a ‘fifth element’, a single spiritual ‘drop’ that is the Self and that
becomes lodged in the pineal gland where it can make use of the distributed sensory
systems of the brain. Then Tucker forced him to admit that the Self-drop can itself be
divided, and that were it to divide, mental unity would be dissipated, while the
substantial basis of that unity would remain. His hypothetical opponent replied that
even though while so divided the person may not be able to have experiences, his
substantial base would still be existing and so the person would continue; further, if
at a later time the person’s Self-drop were brought back together (as it surely could
be), then the person would reacquire the ability to experience.

At this point, Tucker introduced a variation on fission and fusion:

You know the almighty power of Chance, and how in the course of
infinite ages she must produce all possible combinations. Now one
possible combination is this; that some thousands of years hence half
your drop and half mine should join in one pineal gland, and the other
halves in some other pineal gland. Will these two compounds be persons
having knowledge of their own existence?—I make no doubt of it. —
Will they be distinct and different persons from one another?—
Certainly—Which of them will be one of us?—Neither.

(Tucker 1763:204–5)

The opponent is forced to conclude: ‘I can never bring myself to believe that I can
become another Person, or part of another Person, or perceive his perceptions, much
less by the perceptions of two’. From this position the opponent finally concedes
that any such Self-drop may vary in substance even during his life and as a result that
his numerical self-identity cannot be based on such a compound material unity.

Tucker’s chapter, ‘Existence of Mind’ in The Light of Nature Pursued was

greatly admired by Hazlitt as tightly argued metaphysics. And so it is, although
today we would no longer accept its arguments, which for the most part are the

FISSION

culmination of eighteenth-century attempts to defend the necessary dependence of
unity of mind and individuality of self on immaterial substance. In this work, after
arguing that matter is essentially divisible, Tucker turned to our intuitions of our own
individuality and uniqueness noting that no matter how skeptical a man becomes
none ‘ever doubted of his existence, at the instant time when he reflected on it’
(Tucker 1768–77:v.3, 67). He then argued against the notion that the mind or
perceptive substance could be a compound, like material substance, on the grounds
that ‘if composition prevailed in Mind too, every Self must contain a number of little
Selves, every Mind many little Minds, and every Sentient principle a multitude of
Sentient principles’. Tucker continued: ‘But this is a supposal that will not bear the
mentioning, for who would not be shocked to hear talk of a half or a quarter of a
man’s self? Besides, if things sentient were divisible, the parts might be dispersed
throughout the four quarters of the world, and a man might have perceptions at the
same time in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America’ (Ibid.: 69– 70). Tucker then rejected
the idea that the self could be composed of a compound of non-perceptive components
or atoms.

Continuing to pursue another version of this latter possibility, Tucker suggested

that his opponent might reply ‘that mind is not so much a collection of particular
atoms, as a figure or harmony resulting from the order wherein they lie, and therefore
may continue the same although some, or all of the atoms be shifted’. Consideration
of this possibility then led Tucker to reflect on fission-like replication: ‘Besides,
where shall we place personality? for there is no difference between similitude and
identity in forms…therefore two minds composed of atoms, having an exactly similar
disposition, must be the same person, and thus there may be a thousand same persons
in so many different parts of the globe, as there may be a thousand same forms and
harmonies’. Tucker took this consideration as showing that the identity—or rather
particularity and uniqueness—of mind cannot be maintained by its form alone. He
argued that changes of the form through activities of the mind would imply that we
are constantly changing our identities as we perceive and think, as well as when we
grow and change character. He thought such a conclusion ‘contrary to the
apprehensions of all mankind who esteem themselves the same person from cradle
to grave, notwithstanding any variations of character and capacity they may have
gone through in the interval’ (Ibid.: 72–5).

Tucker also argued directly against Locke’s view of personal identity, which he

interpreted as implying that identity depends on a quality, rather than on a being, and
that on any such account ‘a man loses his existence or personality every time he
loses his consciousness by falling asleep’ (Ibid.: 76). Like others, Tucker saw
consciousness as providing evidence of our identity rather than as constituting it. He
argued that since the same or perfectly similar conscious states can occur in different
persons, conscious states per se cannot determine identity but, rather, presuppose the
existence of the person whose conscious states they are.

Finally, in arguing against Locke’s suggestion that ‘the faculty of thinking may

be annexed to a system of matter’, Tucker entertained problems associated with
unity of consciousness and the impossibility that conscious judgments could be

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

distributed spatio-temporally within a system of matter (Ibid.: 77). Using a fission
argument similar to that developed earlier when considering ‘form’, he stated:

If Self be not a substance but a system of substances ranged in some
particular order, there appears no such necessary connection between
any one Self and any precise collection of substances or percipient
form…but that they might have contained any other Self …and we
must look for some cause yet undiscovered to assign each system its
personality. This cause then, before I was existent, might have assigned
my personality to any other similar substances disposed in the like
order in some distant part of the globe: now why may not this cause do
the same at the present instant? …therefore there might have been two
Myselves some thousands of miles apart. But if such a supposition
would shock the ears and understanding of every man it will necessarily
follow that every Self must be a substance numerically distinct from
all others, of whose identity no other substance nor system of substances
can participate. And if a substance, it must be one uncompounded of
parts: for I am nothing else besides Myself, nor can contain any thing
that is not Me, nor yet can I have parts which are neither me nor any
thing else.

(Ibid.: 80–1)

Two hundred years later, we are no longer shocked at the supposition of ‘two

Myselves’. Only slightly different examples of fission, in which there is a more
direct connection between the original and its continuers, such as we shall soon
consider in Hazlitt’s writings, have revolutionized our conceptions of personal
identity and what matters in survival.

Thomas Reid

Reid, who as we shall see in Chapter 5 had read the debate between Clarke and
Collins, drew attention to fission examples, albeit briefly, when he said of
Locke’s view of personal identity that it ‘hath some strange consequences,
which the author was aware of, Such as, that, if the same consciousness can be
transferred from one intelligent being to another, which he thinks we cannot
shew to be impossible, than two or twenty intelligent beings may be the same
person’ (Reid 1785:v.1, 351). There is every reason to believe that Reid here
had in mind what we have called a genuine fission example. In a letter to Lord
Kames, which Reid wrote in 1775, he said:

Dr. Priestley in his last book thinks that the power of perception, as
much as the other powers that are termed mental, is the natural
result of an organic structure such as that of the human brain.
Consequently, the whole man becomes extinct at death; and we

FISSION

have no hope of surviving the grave but what is derived from the
Christian revelation. I would be glad to know your lordship’s
opinion, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and
when some hundred years after, the same materials are again
fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being—whether,
I say, that being will be me; or if two or three such beings should
be formed out of my brain, whether they will all be me, and
consequently be all one and the same intelligent being. This seems
to me a great mystery; but Dr. Priestley denies all mysteries.

(Fraser 1898:97)

So, Reid not only knew about fission examples but, like Clarke, used them to
argue against materialism. In general, Reid’s view and his criticisms of Locke
were similar to Butler’s. Like Hume, however, Reid took a greater interest
than did Butler in the origins of our empirical understanding of the self.

Fission examples: the legacy

Except for Locke’s brief mention of them, fission examples became visible in
the debate over personal identity as a potential source of objections to relational
theories. Clarke, especially, wielded fission examples like a sword, with which
he tried to slay a two-headed dragon, one head of which was relational theories
of personal identity and the other the impending naturalization of the soul.
Apparently, in the philosophical culture generally, as the examples of Grove,
Butler, and Tucker suggest, Clarke’s strategy seemed promising initially and
continued to be attractive. But, as we shall see, the sword of fission examples
proved to be double-edged. Whereas one side could be used to inflict wounds
on relational theories of personal identity, the other side would soon be turned
on the concept of personal identity itself; for instance, fission examples seem
to have played a role in Hume’s ultimate conclusion that ‘all the nice and
subtile questions concerning personal identity’ are merely verbal. In the views
of some others, fission examples clearly did become a weapon that was used to
attack traditional assumptions about personal identity’s importance.

As we have seen, Reid claimed, with disdain, that ‘Dr. Priestley denies all

mysteries’. Reid was right. Priestley, who was aware of fission examples and
the uses to which they had been put in the personal identity debates, seems to
have argued independently of fission examples that personal identity is not
what matters in survival. Thirty years later, his student, Hazlitt, went further,
using fission examples not only to argue that personal identity is not what
matters primarily, but to deny altogether the appropriateness of future-oriented
self-interest. In Chapter 5, we shall consider the views of Priestley and Hazlitt.

By the time Priestley had finished, the soul was finished, at least as a

scientifically useful notion. Although it would linger for quite awhile—indeed
throughout the nineteenth century—not only in the scientifically irrelevant and

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

retrogressive backwaters of natural theology, but also on the margins of
progressive developments, it had been stripped of its god-like powers. The
dogma of reflexive consciousness was also rejected. The way was then open to
suggest a developmental view of the acquisition of self-concepts. Hazlitt, as
we shall see, was among the first to do this. In the views of many thinkers, the
immaterial, immortal, supernatural soul had transformed into the material,
mortal, natural mind. Just as in the Christian myth, God, as it were, had become
man. But it would not happen without a fierce struggle. On the philosophical
battlefield, swords would swing in every direction and not only heads, but also
souls, would roll.

THE SELF AS SOUL

For decades before the appearance of Locke’s Essay, philosophers who wrote
about self and personal identity were primarily concerned with the details of
post-mortem existence—whether the soul would be reunited with a body and,
if it would, with what sort of body, and so on. After the appearance of Locke’s
Essay, these questions were largely replaced by two others: whether matter
can think; and whether, without recourse to the immaterial soul, personal
identity can be explained. Because these naturalistic issues became the focus
of interest, discussions of self and personal identity tended inevitably and, as
the century wore on, increasingly to gravitate toward this-worldly concerns.
But not all of these were empirical concerns.

Toward the beginning of the century, the idea that the soul or mind could

be investigated a priori was alive and well. To many thinkers, more seemed to
hang in the balance than simply how best to determine our own natures.
Materialism and atheism were thought to go hand in hand, as were atheism
and debauchery. Stillingfleet (1697), Clarke (1738), and Butler (1726), for
instance, were sure that the concession that matter can think would lead all
but inevitably to the end of religion and morality. To combat these feared
consequences thinkers fought the suggestion that the soul might be material.

Through the first two decades of the eighteenth century, traditional

metaphysicians, such as Clarke, could stick to their a priori weapons and only
occasionally dirty their hands with empirical analysis of mental phenomena.
Eventually, however, even traditionalists who espoused that ‘the thinking
principle within us’ is immaterial and indivisible coupled such commitments
with empirical analyses of the soul’s activities. In many cases, they did this
not grudgingly, but as willing participants in a continually growing collective
vision. Berkeley, for example, appended to his thin and somewhat defensive
insistence on the immaterial soul, an expansive, empirically based account of
vision that made virtually no use of his immaterialist metaphysics. Butler, in
his sermons on human nature, did much the same, though not to the same
degree. And, toward the end of the century, Reid (1764) was, if anything,
more enthused and expansive about the empirical parts of his account than
about its metaphysically spiritual underpinnings. In short, even in the theories

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

of traditionally minded thinkers, there was a growing inclination to subordinate
rational psychology to empirical investigation. However, only in retrospect
has it been clear which way things were going.

Thinking matter

In the Essay, the most controversial thing Locke wrote was that matter might
think.

He put forth this suggestion, in Book IV, almost as an aside. A generation

earlier, Hobbes’ dogmatically asserted materialism had provoked more
unthinking denunciation than genuine discussion. The lesson had not been
lost on Locke, who proposed modestly only that it is ‘impossible for us, by
the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover whether
Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power
to perceive and think’. The reason, Locke claimed, is that ‘in respect to our
Motions’, it is ‘not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive,
that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than
that he should superadd to it another Substance [i.e., an immaterial soul] with
a Faculty of Thinking; since we know not wherein Thinking consists, nor to
what sort of Substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that Power’
(Locke 1975:IV.iii.6;540–1). Thus, unlike Hobbes, Locke did not actually say
that matter can think. Rather, he said only that, for all we know, it can think.
And either because Locke was genuinely pious, which in fact he was, or
because he was clever, which he also was, he tied the denial that matter can
think to the assertion that God’s powers are limited, thus, attempting to disarm
his critics.

It did not work. Stillingfleet and others were outraged. For traditionalists

the main threat from Locke’s seemingly innocent speculation was that if matter
can think, then for the purposes of metaphysical and psychological explanation,
the immaterial soul might be dispensable. But for those who would develop a
science of the mind that was the point. There was no investigating the
immaterial soul empirically. Since its nature and essential properties were
determined a priori it had no internal structure open to empirical inquiry. For
example, it could not be decided by observation whether the soul is always
thinking, or even whether animals have immaterial souls.

Although the soul

was reputed to be active, perhaps even to be the only thing except for God
that is active, it did not develop in anyway and, hence, as an object of
investigation it is completely static. In sum, once the arguments about whether
the immortal soul exists were concluded, one accepted its presence or not.
There was nothing much to investigate. By comparison, the phenomena of
consciousness were seen to be multifaceted and dynamic. And there was no
doubt about their existence. Yet no one had ever tried systematically to account
for their behavior. Thus, whether a thinker was for or against Locke’s novel
suggestion that perhaps matter can think, investigating the mind required
empirical inquiry. Early in the century a Clarke might take the high road and

THE SELF AS SOUL

resist this descent into merely probable and contingent results. But when it
came to the investigation of human nature, the emerging program of empirical
psychology was the only game in town. One either played it or took oneself
completely out of the action. In resisting its lure, thinkers like Clarke became
the last of a dying breed.

Clarke and Collins

Clarke and Collins debated each other for three years. Their point of departure
was the question of whether souls are naturally immortal. By soul, both of them
agreed to mean ‘Substance with a Power of Thinking’ or ‘Individual Consciousness’
(Clarke 1738:750). Clarke defended the traditional idea that souls are naturally
immortal, since they are immaterial and, hence, indivisible. However, he argued for
this view in a novel way, precisely because the newly emerging science of mind
forced him to defeat the suggestion that mental properties are emergent. His adversary,
Collins, countered that the soul is material. Both agreed that individual atoms are not
conscious. The dispute between them turned on the question of whether it is possible
that a system of matter can think. Clarke argued that it is not possible, Collins that
matter actually does think.

Throughout, Clarke played the part of the traditional metaphysician, albeit one

who was extraordinarily well informed scientifically. He thought he knew, largely for
a priori reasons, that the soul is indivisible, even though, in his view, the soul is extended!
Collins, though not always consistently, played the role of the empirical psychologist.
His faltering, but often successful attempts to reformulate traditional metaphysical
issues empirically, embodied the birth pangs of a new approach. This new approach
was then fully born in subsequent thinkers and grew steadily throughout the century.
The debate is, thus, a poignant record of two thinkers’ struggle to cope with a rapidly
changing intellectual climate, one by hanging onto the old, the other by gropping for
the new. It is, in microcosm the debate over self and personal identity in the first half
of the eighteenth century.

Collins’ approach was the progressive side of Locke’s, of whom he had been a

close personal friend and devoted disciple. Collins even had religious views that were
similar to, though perhaps more liberal, than Locke’s (Ibid.: 864). Yet Collins was
disposed and able to go beyond Locke, particularly in two ways: first, methodologically,
if not also ontologically, he was unabashedly materialist; and, second, he replaced
Locke’s metaphysically awkward same-consciousness view of personal identity with
a more defensible connected-consciousness view. In short, Collins was, as Locke
himself seems to have forseen, what Locke might have become had he lived longer
and adapted his views and approach to the newly emerging empirical study of the
mind. During the last year of his life, Locke remarked to a third party that he regarded
Collins as such a philosophically amiable companion that he numbered his own days
by the length of his friendship with Collins. Toward the end of his life, Locke wrote to
Collins that he regarded him as one who would extend Locke’s own work into the
future (Locke 1823:v.10, 271).

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

At the beginning of their debate, Clarke and Collins agreed on three basic

assumptions: first, that consciousness is a ‘real property of the mind’; second,
that the individual atoms of which human bodies are ultimately composed are
not themselves conscious; and, third, that if consciousness were a property of
the body, then since it is not a property of the ultimate constituents out of
which the body is composed, it has to be a higher order property of a material
system, that is, as we might say, an emergent property.

Clarke was an extreme nominalist. Throughout the debate he denied that

any emergent property could be ‘real’. While admitting that certain higher
level properties, such as the ‘Magnitude’ and the ‘Motion’ of a body, could be
real, he carefully explained that they enjoyed this status just because they are
nothing but the ‘sum’ of the magnitudes and motions of the ultimate parts out
of which the relevant bodies are composed (Clarke 1738:759). He excluded
as real properties of any material system secondary qualities, such as the
‘sweetness of a rose’, on the grounds that they are effects produced by material
systems in some other substance. Finally, he excluded properties such as
‘Magnetism’ and ‘Electrical Attraction’ as real properties since they are ‘merely
abstract Names to express the Effects of some determinate Motion of certain
Streams of Matter’. Gravitation, in his view, is a special case. It ‘is not a
Quality inhering in Matter, or that can possibly result from any Texture or
Composition of it; but only an Effect of the continual and regular Operation
of some other Being upon it; by which the Parts are all made to tend one
towards another’ (Ibid.: 759–60).

‘Under these three Heads’, Clarke continued, ‘must necessarily be contained

all possible Qualities, Modes or Powers whatsoever’. That is, ‘they must either
be Qualities really inhering in the Subject to which they are usually ascribed;
or Modes produced by it in some other Subject; or else mere Abstract Names,
signifying certain Powers or Effects that do not properly reside in any Subject
at all’. Consciousness, he said, since it is a real property, has to be a property
of the first sort. But, he argued, were consciousness a property of a system of
matter, it would be an emergent property and no emergent property can be a
property of the first sort. Hence, in his view, consciousness cannot be a property
of a system of matter:

To suppose any Power or Quality of this kind, arising from, or
belonging to any whole System of Matter, without belonging to
the several Parts of which that Whole consists, is a direct and
express Contradiction: It is supposing either an Universal to exist,
without Particulars; or an Effect to be produced without a Cause,
or to have more in it than was in the Cause; or that a Quality is by
the Power of God made so to arise out of Nothing, as to be
superadded to a Subject, and to subsist without inhering in that
Subject, to which it is at the same time supposed to belong.

(Ibid.)

THE SELF AS SOUL

Throughout the debate, this was the heart of Clarke’s argument.

Collins did not challenge Clarke’s view that magnetism and electricity are

unreal. Instead, he denied that one could know a priori that all emergent
properties, and consciousness in particular, are unreal. He claimed that Clarke’s
attempt to so argue merely begged the question. Whether an emergent property
is real, Collins countered, is a matter to be determined case by case, empirically.
What, though, do we learn by examining actual cases that is relevant to assessing
the ontological status of consciousness? In Collins’ view, three things: first, ‘by
Experience we see that every thing by change of Form becomes every thing.
The same Parts of Matter become Parts of Dung, Earth, Grass, Corn, Sheep,
Horses, Men, &c. and act their Parts under these Mutations’; second, and ‘equally
matter of fact’, in the case of examples such as that of the gestation of a bird, we
see ‘That the Matter of which an Egg consists, doth intirely constitute the young
one, and that the Action of Sensation began under a particular Disposition of
the Parts by Motion, without the Addition of an Immaterial and Immortal Soul’;
and, third, we learn by experience that there are in some systems of matter
‘Power[s] to make or receive a Change, to act or be acted on, that [are] not the
Sum or Aggregate of Powers of the same kind’ (Ibid.: 758, 767–9)

Consider, for instance, texture. According to Collins:

The Texture, let it be of the Eye, Ear, or any other part of Man is
essentially different from the Texture of other Beings, and the Texture
of the Parts of the Being itself; and it is from its Texture, as well as
from its Magnitude and Motion, that the Matter of which the Eye
consists, has a Power to make or receive a Change, to act or be acted
on: which Power depends so intirely on the particular Texture, that
upon the least Alteration of some Parts of the Eye, it ceases to have
a Power of being operated on by external Objects, or of contributing
to the Act of Vision.

(Ibid.: 769)

Thus, in Collins’ view, experience, not a competing a priori theory, under-mines
some of Clarke’s crucial a priori assumptions.

According to Collins, the basic problem with Clarke’s argument is that he

was trying to settle by verbal fiat what could only be settled empirically:

Saying That Consciousness is an Individual Power (be they ever so
many that say so) is but calling Consciousness by another name. It
is not giving an account of what Consciousness is, wherein it doth
consist, which is requisite to demonstrate from Consciousness, that
Consciousness cannot be added to a Being that consists of actually
separate and distinct Parts.

(Ibid.)

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

By ‘an account of what consciousness is’, Collins meant an analysis of
consciousness for which there is empirical evidence. So, what he wanted was
not a way of describing consciousness, but a way of analyzing it empirically
and then explaining it.

Moreover, in Collins’ view, not all items of consciousness are alike. In the

case of some, a proper account of what consciousness is would have to be
developmental, whereas in the case of others it would have to explain
pathology. ‘For we know by Experience, that the Soul or Thinking Being
undergoes several Changes or Alterations. It has not only different Passions,
as Anger, Love, &c. at different times, which are Modifications of the Soul,
that begin and have their Period, but has Qualities or Powers, such as Seeing
and Hearing, which by the Defect of our Organs plainly cease for a time’
(Ibid.: 772–3) In Collins’ opinion, the provision of some such account of
consciousness was a requirement for any acceptable view, including his own.
For ‘if one should undertake to demonstrate to me, that Consciousness can
only inhere in a System of Matter, and for this Purpose should tell me, that
Consciousness is an Organical Operation, I should desire him to tell me wherein
Thinking or Consciousness doth consist?’ And, Collins continued, ‘if he would
do that, I should be able to know whether it is an Organical Operation or not:
whereas his telling me that it is an Organical Operation, leaves me as ignorant
what Thinking is, in what it does consist, as I was before those sounds reached
in my ear’.

But Mr. Clarke has not said anything to this Question, but barely
by calling Consciousness an Individual Power. His Argument
therefore, stripped of all doubtful Expressions, and resting on the
Proofs by which he supports it, is this: Matter is a Substance
consisting always of actually separate and distinct Parts;
Consciousness cannot reside in a Being which consists in actually
separate and distinct Parts; therefore Matter cannot think, or be
conscious. To support which Connection he has no intermediate
Ideas, but by saying, Consciousness is an Individual Power, and
an Individual Power cannot reside in a Being that consists of Parts;
therefore Consciousness cannot reside in a Being which consists
of Parts: which carries the Matter not one jot further than merely
supposing Consciousness to be a Power which can only reside in
Individual Beings.

(Ibid.: 769–70)

Collins, thus, pushed hard.

Clarke, unmoved, gave a four-part response to Collins’ requirement that he

provide an empirical analysis of consciousness: first, he explained that
‘Consciousness, in the most strict and exact Sense of the Word, signifies neither

THE SELF AS SOUL

a Capacity of Thinking, nor yet Actual Thinking, but the Reflex Act by which I
know that I think, and that my Thoughts and Actions are my own and not
Another’s’. Second, he explained that by Individual Power’ he meant ‘such a
Power as is really and truly in the nature of the Thing itself One Power, in
opposition to its being such merely in our abstract Complex Notion’; by an
individual power, he continued, ‘I mean thereby to express that it is really and
truly one undivided Consciousness, and not a Multitude of distinct
Consciousnesss added together’. Next, he claimed that ‘it would necessarily
imply a plain and direct Contradiction, for any power which is really One and
not Many…to inhere in or result from a divisible Substance’ (Ibid.: 784).

far, then, Clarke stuck to the high road of a priori metaphysics.

In his fourth point, Clarke claimed that if, as Collins asserted, ‘the Brain or

Spirits be the Subject of Consciousness’, and thus the subject of consciousness
be ‘in perpetual flux and change’, then ‘That Consciousness, by which I not
only Remember that certain Things were done many Years since, but also am
Conscious that they were done by Me, by the very same individual Conscious
Being who now remembers them…is transferred from one Subject to another;
that is to say, that it is real Quality which subsists without inhering in any Subject
at all’ (Ibid.: 787). Clarke’s fourth point, in effect, invited Collins to explain
how on his own view, memory could be understood. He, thus, gave Collins an
opening to return to the theme that Clarke lacked an empirical analysis of
consciousness. In anticipation of Collins’ expected reply, Clarke tried to cut
him off at the pass, by conceding in advance that his ‘affirming Consciousness
to be an individual Power, is not giving an Account of what Consciousness is’
but then ‘neither was it intended to be so’. It is enough, Clarke continued, that:

Every Man feels and knows by Experience what Consciousness is,
better than any Man can explain it: Which is the Case of all simple
ideas: And it is not at all necessary to define more particularly what
it is; but abundantly sufficient that we know and agree what it is
not, viz., that it is not a Multitude of distinct and separate Conscious-
nesses; in order to prove that it does not and cannot inhere in a
Being, that consists of a Multititude of separate and distinct Parts.

(Ibid.: 790)

It would in the end, then, come down to this: a clash between intuition and
science.

As we know from the continuation of this debate into our own times, this

particular conflict may be unresolvable. What would become clear, however,
on the way to this end—and this seems to be a lesson that was not lost on
subsequent thinkers, including those who embraced Clarke’s traditional
immaterialist account of the soul—is that while intuition might be a sufficient
basis to resist the reduction of the mental to the material, it was impotent as a
source of explanations of mental phenomena.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Collins returned to this latter theme again and again, as in the following

remarks:

Thinking or Human Consciousness begins, continues and ends, or
has Generation, Succession and Corruption, like all other Modes of
Matter; as like them it is divided and determined, simple or
compounded, and so on. But if the Soul or Principle of Thinking be
undivided, how can it think successively, divide, abstract, combine
or ampliate, retain or revive Impressions in the memory? And how
can it be capable, partly or wholly, to forget any thing? All which
Phaenomena are naturally conceived, and may be commodiously
explained by the Springs and Movements, and Receptacles; by the
Vigor, Perfection, Disorder or Decay of a bodily Organ, but not by
any thing indivisible.

Collins even illustrated how, on his view, explanations for some of these
phenomena could be forthcoming:

It is so far from being absurd to annex human Consciousness to so
flux a Substance as the Brain, that it will rather be absurd to annex
it to any other Substance but so flux a one as the Brain: For if we
utterly forget, or cease to be conscious of having done many things
in the former Parts of our Lives which we certainly did, as much as
any of those things which we are conscious that we have done; and
if in fact we do by degrees forget every thing which we do not revive
by frequent Recollection, and by again and again imprinting our
decaying Ideas; and if there be in a determinate Time a partial or
total flux of Particles in our Brains: What can better Account for
our total Forgetfulness of some things, our partial Forgetfulness of
others, than to suppose the Substance of the Brain in a constant
Flux? And what can better show that Consciousness is not transferred
from one Subject to another, than our forgetting totally or partially,
according to the Brain’s being more or less in a Flux?

Collins then continued by explaining how he would account for remembrance:

I can know ‘I’ did something in the past despite this flux which may
involve no residual particles that were part of the original system at
the time of an event: Consciousness of having done [an] Action is
an Idea imprinted on the Brain, by recollecting or bringing into View
our Ideas before they are worn out; which continues in me, not only
the Memory of the Action itself, but that I did it. And if there is now
and then a Recollection of a past Action, Mr. Clarke may, by what I
have said, conceive a Man may be conscious of things done by him,

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though he has not one Particle of Matter the same that he had at the
doing of those things, without Consciousness’s being transferred from
one Subject to another in any absurd Sense of those words.

(Ibid.: 807–9)

This illustrates what Collins meant by an account of consciousness.

Clearly Collins thought that in the cases of memory and forgetting he could not

only give an account of consciousness, but give one that would explain how
consciousness, over time, could be transferred from a material system of the brain
initially composed of certain particles to one composed of another, without changing
the individual subject of consciousness whose brain is involved. By our contemporary
standards, his explanation—that it is by repeatedly recollecting that we keep our
memories from decaying beyond recall—may seem crude (Ibid.: 809, 870). But crude
or not, it was a genuine scientific explanation, and Clarke had nothing comparable to
offer in its stead.

Rather, Clarke accused Collins of ‘begging the Question by, assuming the impossible

Hypothesis’ that the subject in Collins’ example who originally had the experience
that subsequently would be remembered and any subject who subsequently
remembered it would be the same:

Supposing it were possible, that the Memory in general of such or such
an Action’s having been done, might be preserved in the Manner you
suppose; yet it is a manifest Contradiction, that the Consciousness of its
being done by me, by my own individual self in particular, should continue
in me after my whole Substance is changed; unless Consciousness could
be transferred from one Subject to another, in the absurdest Sense of
those Words. For to suppose that one Substance should be Conscious of
an Action’s having been done by itself, which really was not done by it,
but by another Substance, is plainly supposing an individual Quality to
be transferred from one Subject to another, in the most absurd Sense; as
is plain that Consciousness is a real, individual Quality, and different
from bare general Memory.

Clarke then declared that on Collins’ account, consciousness, rather than being a real
individual quality, is a ‘fleeting transferrable Mode or Power’:

That the Person may still be the same, by a continual Superaddition of
the like Consciousness; notwithstanding the whole Substance be changed:
then I say, you make individual Personality to be a mere external imaginary
Denomination, and nothing in reality: just as a Ship is called the same
Ship, after the whole substance is changed by frequent Repairs; or a River
is called the same River, though the Water of it be every Day new.

And so, on Collins’ view, the self, in effect, would be a fiction:

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

But he cannot be really and truly the same Person, unless the
same numerical Consciousness can be transferred from one
Subject to another. For, the continued Addition or Exciting of a
like Consciousness in the new acquired Parts, after the Manner
you suppose; is nothing but a Deception and Delusion, under the
Form of Memory; a making the Man to seem himself to be
conscious of having done that, which was not done by him, but
by another.

(Ibid.: 844–5)

Thus, Collins’ attempt to characterize how consciousness could be

understood on the hypothesis of the brain as its material substrate had forced
Clarke, and as we shall see, Collins also, to recognize what was thought to
be a decisive implication of Collins’ hypothesis. The implication is that the
apparent unity of self-consciousness actually involves a series of numerically
different acts of consciousness, whose subject cannot be one simple
individual being. In Clarke’s mind, it was a conclusive refutation of Collins’
view that this consequence followed from it.

For his part, Collins embraced the consequence. He eventually

distinguished between the immediate subject of an action or state of
consciousness, and the organized being, or brain, which is the substantial
base for the sequence of states of consciousness. In response to Clarke’s
concerns about transference of consciousness from one subject to another,
Collins admitted that ‘The Quality of a Subject can only be the Quality of
that Subject wherein it exists, and not of another Subject. The Motion of a
System of Matter can only be the Motion of that System’. Thus:

The Consciousness of any Being can only be the Consciousness
of that particular Being. And I further observe, that the Motion
of a System of Matter one Day can never be the Motion of the
same numerical System the next Day, nor the Consciousness of
Yesterday be the same numerical Consciousness that I have to
Day, let the Being that is conscious in me be divisible or
indivisible.

So, the mode of a substance, once the mode ceases, can never be the same as
another mode of the same kind, whether it is a mode of the same or a different
substance. It follows, Collins continued, that:

It is thus as intelligible to me that the Memory of Things should
be preserved by a Being in a Flux, as by a Being that is not so.
For the individual Consciousness To-Day, can neither in an
indivisible or divisible Being be the individual Consciousness
To-morrow; that Consciousness is a perfectly distinct Action in
both Beings from the preceding Consciousness the Day before.

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And whenever Mr. Clarke accounts for an indivisible Being’s
remembrance of an Action or Thought, I promise to account for Memory
in a divisible Being.

(Ibid.: 819–20)

In response to Clarke’s attempted proof of the impossibility that consciousness
could reside in the substance of the brain, Collins replied that it ‘is plain, that all Mr.
Clarke’s Propositions are founded on his considering Consciousness to be something
else than that I contend it is’. Thus, the exchange, which began over the issue of the
immateriality of the soul and the possibility of matter thinking, expanded to include
a discussion of alternative theoretical interpretations of consciousness and its relations
to the substance and activities of the brain.

Ultimately, Collins appealed to an analogy between consciousness and the

property of roundness to blunt the force of Clarke’s claim that emergent properties
cannot be ‘real’. Collins pointed out that individually the arches out of which a
circle is composed are not round, but collectively, when properly arranged, they are
round. Yet roundness, as even Clarke admitted, is a real property. In this final part of
the debate between them, the question turned on whether this analogy is a good
one. Clarke, of course, claimed that it is a bad analogy. In the end, he claimed that
what made roundness a real property of the circle is that although the arches are not
individually round, they have a ‘tendency’ toward roundness. He denied that the
same could be said of the material atoms out of which Collins was claiming conscious
systems might ultimately be composed. Collins, on the other hand, claimed that the
atoms did indeed have a tendency toward consciousness (Ibid.: 860, 890, 894).

Since neither Clarke nor Collins had a principled way of setting the limits to

such ‘tendencies’, there was no way to resolve this impasse. So, Clarke simply
reiterated the nominalist thesis with which he began:

You intend to make Thinking not a real Quality, but a mere empty Name
or external Denomination, such as I at first ranked under the Third
Head. For the most complex Modes of Motion possible, whatever Name
we give them, is nothing but a mere external Denomination. Thinking
therefore, according to you, being only a very complex Mode of Motion
[or of any other Quality of Matter] is likewise nothing but a mere external
Name or Denomination of that Mode. Which Notion of yours concerning
Thinking, is certainly a mere Chimera; and a very absurd one.

(Ibid.: 899)

Clarke then returned to his point that what consciousness is can be known intuitively.

This may seem a disappointing outcome. But it is consequential. For, in the

end, eighteenth century readers of this debate were left with a choice among
three options. First, as Clarke had done, they could stay with the a priori,
immaterialist view of the soul and give the back of their hands to the emerging
scientific study of the mind. Second, they could somehow combine their

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

commitment to the a priori, immaterialist view of the soul with the emerging
scientific study of the mind. Or, finally, as Collins had done, they could throw off
the traditional metaphysical view of self and cast their lot entirely with the emerging
scientific study of the mind. Early in the century, when Clarke and Collins had
their debate, it seemed to many that the real choices were between the first and
the third of these options. But as the century progressed, it increasingly became
apparent to virtually everyone that the real choices were between the second and
the third options. By mid-century no serious thinker eschewed the scientific study
of the mind. The worm had turned.

Shaftesbury

The movement toward empiricism in the study of mind was matched by a
movement toward empiricism in the study of morals and prudence. The issues of
self and personal identity linked these domains. Collins had been one of the first
of Locke’s students to embrace materialism as a research strategy for the study of
mind. Shaftesbury was one of the first of his students to embrace materialism as a
research strategy in ethical theory. But whereas Collins thought that he got his
impetus toward materialism from Locke, Shaftesbury thought that he got his by
opposing Locke.

Born in 1671, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, was

educated under Locke’s personal direction. Yet, by the time Shaftesbury reached
maturity, there were important differences in their respective philosophies. For
instance, Shaftesbury dismissed Locke’s laborious objections against innate ideas
as ‘one of the childishest disputes that ever was’ (Rand 1900:345–7). And whereas
Locke thought that morality, like geometry, could be derived from a priori
principles, Shaftesbury thought that all we need to know about morality emanates
from human nature. Ironically, since Shaftesbury was the first to champion ‘moral
sense’, in ethical theory he was more empirical than the father of empiricism.
One could almost say that what Locke was to the Cartesians on the issue of innate
ideas, Shaftesbury was to Locke on the issue of moral principles.

In one respect, Shaftesbury and Locke were similar. Both tried to avoid

constructive metaphysics. But whereas Locke argued at length against metaphysical
views he rejected, Shaftesbury tried to jettison metaphysics altogether, claiming
that metaphysical questions were unanswerable and metaphysical answers both
paradoxical and too far removed from what one needs to know to live a good and
happy life to be worth pursuing. When it came to constructive metaphysics, Locke,
for the most part, retreated to a theological pragmatism, Shaftesbury to a purely
secular pragmatism.

Yet, Shaftesbury too became embroiled in metaphysics, particularly in opposing

the mind—body dualism of his day, to which he thought Locke had made too
many concessions. Shaftesbury advanced in its stead a neutral monism that shaded
into materialism. A friend and admirer of Bayle, he attacked dualism with
skepticism:

THE SELF AS SOUL

As for what is said of ‘A material unthinking substance being never
able to have produced an immaterial thinking one’, I readily grant
it, but on the condition of this great maxim of nothing being ever
made from nothing may hold as well on my side as my adversary’s.
And then, I suppose, that whilst the world endures, he will be at a
loss how to assign a beginning to matter, or how to suggest a
possibility of annihilating it…The poor dregs of sorry matter can
no more be made out of the simple pure substance of immaterial
thought, than the high spirits of thought or reason can be extracted
from the gross substance of heavy matter. So let the dogmatists make
of this argument what they can.

(Shaftesbury 1711:v.2, 69–70)

In Shaftesbury’s view, Nature, a single great unity, with both mental and material
attributes, is capable of varying degrees of purpose and mentality.

Shaftesbury agreed with Hobbes and Locke that it is life that unifies animate

matter, and that life should be understood mechanistically: it is in virtue of the
‘sympathising of parts’ that we find in a tree that it ‘is a real tree, lives, flourishes,
and is still one and the same even when by vegetation and change of substance
not one particle in it remains the same’ (Ibid.: 99–100). However, he suggested
that trees form a natural kind, whereas, as we have seen, Locke’s nominalism
about essences can be taken to imply that for him there are only nominal kinds.

Shaftesbury rejected the idea, prevalent at the time, that unless one’s theory

of personal identity supports the idea of survival and is compatible with divine
rewards and punishments, people will lose their incentive to be moral. He
believed, instead, in a religion of nature, in acting morally now for its own sake,
and professed no concern whatsoever for the afterlife, writing in disgust that
‘philosophy seems at present to be the study of making virtue burden-some and
death uneasy’. He recommended that people ‘make the most of life and least of
death’, by doing ‘the most good, and that the most freely and generously,
throwing aside selfishness, mercenariness, and such servile thoughts as unfit us
even for this world, and much more for a better’:

This is my best advice; and I leave with you, as that which I have
lived and shall die by. Let every one answer for their own experience,
and speak of happiness and good as they find it. Thank heaven I can
do good and find heaven in it, I know nothing else that is heavenly.
And if this disposition fits me not for heaven, I desire never to be
fitted for it, nor come into the place.

(Rand 1900:345–7)

Shaftesbury concluded: ‘I ask no reward from heaven for that which is reward itself.
Let my being be continued or discontinued, as in the main best. The author of it best
knows, and I trust Him with it. To me it is indifferent, and always shall be so.’

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

In regard to personal identity, Shaftesbury stressed that, as ‘the meanest

anatomist can tell us, the “stuff” out of which we are composed is constantly
changing, with complete replacement every “twice seven years”.’ Beyond that,
he claimed that peoples’ characters also are constantly changing: ‘’Tis good fortune
if a man be one and the same only for a day or two. A year makes more revolutions
than can be numbered.’ Still, Shaftesbury conceded, ‘when he comes to suffer or
to be punished for…vices, he finds himself…still one and the same’. He concluded,
‘You see, therefore, there is a strange simplicity in this you and me, that in reality
they should be still one and the same, when neither one atom of body, one passion,
nor one thought remains the same’ (Shaftesbury 1711:v.2, 101).

What accounts for this strange simplicity in ‘our real and proper self? It is not

clear how Shaftesbury answered this question, but through the voice of a participant
in a dialogue, he seems to have reached a conclusion surprisingly like Locke’s
own: As accidental as my life may be, or as random that humour which governs
it, I know nothing, after all, so real and substantial as myself. Therefore if there be
that thing you call substance, I take for granted I am one. But for anything further
relating to this question…I am determined neither way’ (Ibid.).

Even so, Shaftesbury seems reluctantly to have rejected Locke’s account of

personal identity, but not to embrace another. The problems he saw with Locke’s
view were due to pathologies of memory. So, for instance, in Miscellaneous
Reflections (Ibid.), which may have been influenced by the Clarke—Collins debate,
he stated, ‘That there is something undoubtedly which thinks, our very doubt
itself and scrupulous thought evinces.’

But in what subject that thought resides, and how that subject is
continued one and the same, so as to answer constantly to the supposed
train of thoughts or reflections which seem to run so harmoniously
through a long course of life, with the same relation still to one single
and self-same person, that is not a matter so easily or hastily decided
by those who are nice self-examiners and searchers after truth and
certainty.

He continued:

But the question is, ‘What constitutes the We or I?’ and ‘Whether the
I of this instant be the same with that of any instant preceding or to
come?’ For we have nothing but memory to warrant us, and memory
may be false.

Shaftesbury had no answer to this problem, confessing in the end that ‘I take my
being upon trust’. Then it was moral pragmatism to the rescue:

Let others philosophise as they are able: I shall admire their strength
when, on this topic, they have refuted what able metaphysicians

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object, and Pyrrhonists plead in their own behalf. Meanwhile there
is no impediment, hindrance, or suspension of action on account of
these wonderfully refined speculations. Argument and debate go on
still. Conduct is settled. Rules and measures are given out and
received. Nor do we scruple to act as resolutely upon the mere
supposition that we are, as if we effectually proved it a thousand
times, to the full satisfaction of our metaphysical or Pyrrhonian antagonist.
This to me appears sufficient ground for a moralist.

(Ibid.: 275–6)

In all of this, there is a curious similarity to Locke. The main difference is that whereas
Locke slid over the question of faulty memory, Shaftesbury admitted that it could not
be solved. Both appeal in the end to a kind of pragmatism, but whereas Locke’s was
theological and both other and this-worldly, Shaftesbury’s was secular and completely
this-worldly.

Shaftesbury, like Locke, also took as central the question of our ‘concernment’ for

our earlier and later selves:

Now to be assured that we can never be concerned in anything hereafter,
we must understand what it is which concerns or engages us in anything
present. We must truly know ourselves, and in what this self of ours
consists. We must determine against pre-existence, and give a better reason
for our having never been concerned in aught before our birth than merely
‘because we remember not, nor are conscious’. For in many things we
have been concerned to purpose, of which we have now no memory or
consciousness remaining. And thus we may happen to be again and again
to perpetuity, for any reason we can show to the contrary. All is revolution
in us. We are no more the self-same matter or system or matter from one
day to another. What succession there may be hereafter we know not,
since even now we live by succession, and only perish and are renewed.

(Ibid.: 34–5)

Shaftesbury took the conclusion to these speculations to be a kind of skepticism

regarding self-concern: ‘’Tis in vain we flatter ourselves with the assurance of our
interests ending with a certain shape or form. What interested us at first in it we know
not, any more than how we have since held on, and continued still concerned in such
an assemblage of fleeting particles. Where besides or in what else we may have to do,
perchance, in time to come, we know as little, nor can tell how chance or providence
hereafter may dispose of us.’

Shaftesbury’s journal, entitled Philosophical Regimen was not published until the

beginning of the twentieth century (Rand 1900). Written as a dialogue between the
author and himself, in it Shaftesbury leans heavily on the meditations of Marcus
Aurelius and the discourses of Epictetus. Although the emphasis is on moral issues
and on the social or ‘artificial’ self, entries on the ‘natural self’ enter into those on

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

personal identity, covering some of the same ground as found in his published works,
including further reflections on self-concern:

The metaphysicians and notable reasoners about the nice matters
of identity, affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost.
And what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If,
whilst I am, I am but as I should be, what do I care more? and thus
let me lose self every hour, and be twenty successive selfs, or new
selfs, ’tis all one to me: so I lose not my opinion. If I carry that
with me ’tis I; all is well. If that go, memory must go too: for how
one without the other? If thou preservest this true opinion of self
(as not body) even whilst in a body, it will not be surely less
confirmed to thee when thou shalt find thyself (if such be the case)
even out of a body. If the now do not belie thee, the hereafter
cannot. If the present state allow it, the future must demonstrate it:
and the better surely for thee, that thou hast thus thought and begun
thus with thyself whilst here. —But why these ifs? Why the
conditioning? Wouldst thou bargain as others do? — What views?
what fancies? —The now; the now. Mind this: in this is all.

(Ibid.: 136–7)

Sounding rather Buddha-like, Shaftesbury was a thinker who, in many ways,

was ahead of his time. Had he argued more fully, he might have been
profoundly influential. As it is, his influence on the subsequent personal
identity debate was probably mostly by way of suggestion. And in spite of his
tendencies toward skepticism and mysticism, his main influence was to
encourage the empirical study of morality in human nature. He, thus, had an
important impact on several eighteenth century figures who attempted to
naturalize human nature, including Hutcheson, Butler, Hume, rhetoricians and
aestheticians such as George Campbell and Lord Kames, as well as others in
France and Germany.

George Berkeley

Before Berkeley closed his Philosophical Commentaries (1948) to write his
An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709/1837) and A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710/1965) he noted to
himself his final retreat from any investigation of personal identity: The
Concrete of the Will & understanding I must call the Mind not person, lest
offense be given…Mem: Carefully to omit Defining of Person, or making
much mention of it’ (Berkeley 1948:87; item 713).

Apparently Berkeley felt

that his thoughts about personal identity had led him to ideas that were
religiously dangerous. And so they had. He had begun with something like a
Lockean conception of personal identity but, then, as a consequence of his

THE SELF AS SOUL

attempt to eliminate all abstract ideas, including not only those of material
but also of spiritual substance, he found himself forced to a skeptical position,
more like that of Hume than Locke, from which he felt he had to retreat.
Finally he came to assume— almost dogmatically and in the tradition of
Descartes and Clarke—an underlying simplicity and unity to our minds that
can be known immediately through our actions.

In Berkeley’s earliest notes in his Commentaries, composed before he had

reached this final destination, he wrote: Time train of ideas succeeding each
other’ (4), ‘Duration not distinguish’d from existence’ (5), and ‘Time a
sensation, therefore onely in mind’ (13). This is followed by the note: ‘Eternity
is onely a train of innumerable ideas, hence the immortality of ye Soul easily
conceived, or rather the immortality of the person, yt of ye soul not being
necessary for ought we know’ (14). And later: ‘Nothing properly but persons
i.e. conscious things do exist, all other things are not so much existences as
manners of ye existence of persons’ (24). From this beginning Berkeley finds
a unity of person in the sequence or train of ideas, the ‘percepi’ for which the
person is the ‘percipere’. Later he was to summarize his position as: ‘Existence
is percepi or percipere’. (429).

However, problems arose for Berkeley when he focused on what would

maintain identity within his system: ‘No identity other than perfect likeness
in any individuals besides persons’ (192); and ‘On account of my doctrine the
identity of finite substances must consist in something else than continued
existence, or relation to determin’d time and place of beginning to exist, the
existence of our thoughts (wch being combin’d make all substances) being
frequently interrupted, & they having divers beginnings, & endings’ (194).
From these thoughts he raised the question: ‘wherin consists identity of Person?
not in actual consciousness, for then I’m not the same person I was this day
twelvemonth, but while I think of wt I then did. Not in potential for then all
persons may be the same for ought we know’ (200) (to which he added the
clarificatory note, ‘two sorts of Potential consciousnesses Natural &
praeternatural [here] I mean the latter’ (202)). Much later, he was to use the
first objection in his dialogue, Alciphron: Or, the Minute Philosopher (1732/
1837), in which the minute philosopher is modelled on ‘free thinkers’ like
Collins, and perhaps even written with the Clarke-Collins debate specifically
in mind. In that dialogue, Berkeley proposed that the same man might be
several persons if there is a complete break in consciousness between the
man’s earlier and later phases. His main objection against the ‘same
consciousness’ view, which probably was the source of a similar, but better
known objection in Reid, divides a man into three phases, A, B, and C, and
shows that defining a person in terms of consciousness leads to a contradiction
when the C-person has remembrances of B but not of A, and the B-person has
remembrances of A.

In Berkeley’s Commentaries these difficulties about identity first led him

to the conclusion that ‘It seems improper & liable to difficulties to make the

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

Word Person stand for an Idea, or to make our selves Ideas or thinking things
ideas’ (523). Still trying to avoid what seems to follow from his general
position, he claimed: ‘I am the farthest from Scepticism of any man. I know
with an intuitive knowledge the existence of other things as well as my own
soul, this is wt Locke nor scarce any other Thinking Philosopher will pretend
to’ (563). But, then, in an amazing series of notes shortly thereafter, he seems
forced to a Humean interpretation of his own views: ‘We think we know not
the Soul because we have no imaginable or sensible Idea annex’d to that sound.
This the Effect of prejudice’ (576). ‘Certainly we do not know it. this will be
plain if we examine wt we mean by the word knowledge. Neither doth this
argue any defect in our knowledge no more than our not knowing a
contradiction’ (576a). ‘The very existence of Ideas constitutes the soul’ (577).
‘Consciousness, perception, existence of Ideas seem to be all one’ (578).
‘Consult, ransack yr Understanding wt find you there besides several
perceptions or thoughts. Wt mean you by the word mind you must mean
something that you perceive or yt you do not perceive, a thing not perceived
is a contradiction, to mean (also) a thing you do not perceive is a contradiction.
We are in all this matter strangely abused by words’ (579). ‘Mind is a congeries
of Perceptions. Take away perceptions & you take away the Mind put the
Perceptions & you put the mind’ (580). ‘Say you the Mind is not the
Perceptions, but that thing whch perceives. I answer you are abus’d by the
words that & thing these are vague empty words wthout a meaning’ (581).
Consistent with this view he again addressed, but this time more positively,
the problem of discontinuity: ‘No broken Intervals of Death or Annihilation.
Those Intervals are nothing. Each Person’s time being measured to him by his
own Ideas’ (590).

We see some residues of this position in Berkeley’s treatment of Time in

the Principles, as well as in his discussion there of the resurrection (Berkeley
1965: 69–70). In both discussions, continuity of self seems restricted to
continuity of trains of ideas. Like Hume, the early Berkeley did not deny that
there is an underlying connecting link between conscious states but instead
denied only that we can know its nature other than as a ‘congeries of
Perceptions’. But a strictly empirical approach to self-knowledge was not one
that Berkeley could maintain. He soon wrote: ‘Say you there must be a thinking
substance. Something unknown whch perceives & supports & ties together
the Ideas. Say I, make it appear there is any need of it & you shall have it for
me. I care not to take away any thing I can see the reason to think should
exist’ (637)

Berkeley’s initial approach to unity was through the Will and

Understanding: ’Doctrine of Identity best explain’d by Takeing the Will for
Volitions, the Understanding for Ideas. The difficulty of Consciousness of wt
are never acted etc. solv’d thereby’ (681). But, then, realizing that ‘activity’
is the important element here (673;683), and that ‘The will & the
Understanding may very well be thought two distinct beings’ (709) he

THE SELF AS SOUL

concluded: ‘The Spirit the Active thing that wch is Soul & God is the Will
alone The Ideas are effects impotent things’ (712). At this point he decided to
drop all talk of person and to focus on Mind (713, cited above). However, he
was still worried about what makes for unity: ‘You ask do these volitions
make one Will. wt you ask is meerly about a Word. Unite being no more’
(714). Not satisfied with this answer, he continued: ‘Qu[estion]: wt mean you
by My perceptions, my Volitions? Res[ponse], all the perceptions I perceive
or conceive etc are mine, all the Volitions I am Conscious to are mine’ (744)
and ‘We see no variety or difference betwixt the Volitions, only between their
effects. Tis One Will one Act distinguish’d by the effects. This will, this Act is
the Spirit, operative, Principle, Soul etc’ (788). Becoming more confident
that he has found the key in a unified will he concluded: ‘While I exist or have
any Idea I am eternally, constantly willing, my acquiescing in the present
State is willing’ (791).

It is not long after these earlier notes that Berkeley’s position solidified

into the substantial view of Spirit also to be found in his published works: The
Substance of a Spirit is that it acts, causes, wills, operates, or if you please (to
avoid the quibble yt may be made on ye word it) to act, cause, will, operate
its’ substance is not knowable not being an Idea’ (829) and ‘But the Grand
Mistake is that we know not wt we mean by we or selves or mind. etc. tis most
sure & certain that our Ideas are distinct from the Mind i.e. the Will, the Spirit’
(847). Having convinced himself of the substantial self, independent of ideas,
he concluded: ‘I must not give the Soul or Mind the Scholastic Name pure
act, but rather pure Spirit or active Being’ (870). And reminding himself of
his earlier theory: ‘Dangerous to make Idea & thing terms Convertible, that
were the way to prove spirits are Nothing’ (872). Hume, relishing just this
danger, would adopt the theory that Berkeley disowned.

Did Berkeley ever return to these dark thoughts? Originally the Principles

was intended to be in three parts: the first, on matter; the second, on mind; the
third, on God. The Principles, as we now have them, is just the first of this
projected three-part work. Berkeley never wrote the third part, on God.
However, he did write the second part, on mind, apparently before he published,
in 1713, the first edition of Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
(Berkeley 1965:103–211). By his own account, he ‘lost’ the one and only
copy of his all but completed manuscript of Book II of the Principles.

never returned to the project. No one knows what Berkeley actually wrote, or
what, had he returned to the project, he would have written.

In his published writings, Berkeley, in Alciphron (1732/1837), considered

Locke’s view that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness.
But Berkeley’s closest approach to the issues about self that so frightened
him in his youth seems to be in the third part of the Three Dialogues. There,
in the course of discussing the contradictory nature of material objects, Hylas
(Berkeley’s materialist antagonist) objects to Philonous (Berkeley’s spokes-
person): ‘But the same idea which is in my mind cannot be in yours or in any

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

other mind. Does it not, therefore, follow from your principles that no two can
see the same thing? And is not this highly absurd?’ (Ibid.: 193).

Philonous responds to this by taking the view that at least in its application

to material objects that are composite and persist over time, how we should
understand identity or sameness is a merely verbal matter, to be decided on
pragmatic grounds. He says that If the term “same” be taken in the vulgar
acceptation, it is certain’ that ‘different persons may perceive the same thing, or
the same thing or idea exist in different minds’. He then notes that ‘words are of
arbitrary imposition’, and adds:

But if the term ‘same’ be used in the acceptation of philosophers
who pretend to an abstracted notion of identity, then, according to
their sundry definitions of this notion (for it is not yet agreed wherein
that philosophical identity consists), it may or may not be possible
for divers persons to perceive the same thing. But whether
philosophers shall think fit to call a thing the ‘same’ or no is, I
conceive, of small importance.

(Ibid.: 194)

Philonous, then, imagines two philosophers who use the word ‘same’ differently.
He says:

But who sees not that all the dispute is about a word, to wit, whether
what is perceived by different persons may yet have the term ‘same’
applied to it? Or suppose a house whose walls or outward shell
remaining unaltered, the chambers are all pulled down, and new
ones built in their place, and that you should call this the ‘same’,
and I should say it was not the ‘same’ house—would we not for all
this perfectly agree in our thoughts of the house considered in itself?

(Ibid.)

Hylas says that materialists ‘suppose an external archetype to which referring
their several ideas they may truly be said to perceive the same thing’. Philonous,
then, replies that on his view too, one can suppose there is an external archetype,
so long as ‘external’ means to one’s own mind and not to ‘that mind which
comprehends all things’. Philonous concludes, ‘But then, this serves all the
ends of identity, as well as if it existed out of a mind’ (Ibid.: 195).

Particularly in light of Berkeley’s having ‘lost’ Part II of the Principles, what

is fascinating about these exchanges is his willingness, when it comes to the
identity of material objects to take the view that whether an object is identical
with its earlier phases is largely a verbal matter, to be determined pragmatically
in light of the uses to which the notion of identity is put. This, of course, is very
similar to the view that Hume took about disputes over identity in general,
including the identity of persons.

THE SELF AS SOUL

Did Berkeley, in the manuscript for Part II of the Principles or in writing the

Three Dialogues, ever consciously connect such thoughts about the identity of
material objects to the issue of the identity of selves? Although there is no direct
evidence, it seems likely that he did. In the third edition of Three Dialogues,
which was published in 1734, a few pages before the exchange between Hylas
and Philonous just discussed, Berkeley inserted four new paragraphs about the
soul, which included Hylas’ objecting:

Notwithstanding all you have said, to me it seems that, according to
your own way of thinking, and in consequence of your own principles,
it should follow that you are only a system of floating ideas without
any substance to support them. Words are not to be used without a
meaning. And as there is no more meaning in spiritual substance than
in material substance, the one is to be exploded as well as the other.

(Ibid.: 178)

This, of course, is close to Hume’s objection in the Treatise, published just three
years later. To the objection, Philonous replies indignantly:

How often must I repeat that I know or am conscious of my own
being, and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking,
active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas.
I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colors and sounds.

(Ibid.; emphasis added).

So, Berkeley introduced the notions of identity (sameness), just a few pages before
Philonous takes the view that in its application to material objects we can afford
to be relativists about identity. Barring the discovery of new manuscripts or
additional information about Berkeley’s unpublished thoughts, whether at this
point in his life he saw the general application of his relativistic thoughts to the
identity of selves must remain a matter of speculation. However, as we have shown,
it is not a matter of speculation that Berkeley, at least early in his career, was
deeply conflicted about the nature of the soul.

Whatever Berkeley’s true views, he chose to keep secret his early fascination

with the sort of account of self which Hume would later make famous. It seems to
us that in his youth, Berkeley rushed ahead with what turned out to be a dangerous
empirical approach, later to retreat to the safe ground of more comfortable a priori
notions. He had gone to the edge of an abyss, peered over, and drew back in
horror. Hume would go to the same edge, peer over, lose his footing, and stumble
in. The subsequent free fall frightened even Hume, who in the Appendix to the
Treatise, tried desperately on his way down to grasp at something.

Both Berkeley and Hume consoled themselves with empirical studies.

Berkeley, in his An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision (1709/1837) and
Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained (1733/1837), developed accounts
of mentality that were thoroughly empirical and made little use of his official

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

immaterialistic theory of the soul. Not only was he apparently quite conflicted
about his own official account of the soul, he was capable of leaving it behind
to study the mind in a way that even Collins might have admired. In contrast,
although Clarke and Berkeley subscribed to similar views of the soul, their
approaches to the empirical study of mind could hardly have been more
different.

Henry Grove

During the eighteenth century, as the soul became naturalized, what was once
philosophy of soul became philosophy of mind. During the early part of the
century, in major texts the word ‘soul’ occurs about equally often with the
word ‘mind’. By the end of the century, the word ‘soul’ has been almost entirely
replaced by ‘mind’. For instance, in Berkeley’s Principles (1710), the word
‘soul’ occurs nearly as often as the word ‘mind’. In his scientific work on
vision, published at about the same time, he used only the word, ‘mind’. And
in the 1730s, the skeptic, Hume, in the Treatise, used both soul and mind
equally in contexts where in a previous era the word ‘soul’ would have been
used. By contrast, after mid-century, Reid, the ordained minister, whose major
source for philosophical ideas was Hume, used only the word ‘mind’ in those
same contexts. Thus, throughout the century, in empirically oriented works,
as ‘the thinking principle in man’ increasingly became the object of naturalistic
investigation, the term ‘mind’ gradually replaced ‘soul’, even among thinkers,
such as Reid, who maintained a traditional belief in the immaterial soul.

‘Pneumatology’ was a term of major significance throughout most of the

eighteenth century. Originally a scholastic term, at the beginning of the century
it meant the philosophy of spirits, a discipline which included philosophy of
the human spirit (psychology), philosophy of pure spirits other than God
(angelology), and philosophy of God (theology). Throughout the seventeenth
century, pneumatology maintained this threefold structure. However, during
the eighteenth century, and increasingly as the century wore on, pneumatology
became more and more associated with the philosophy of the human spirit
(psychology) and less with that of other spirits. After mid-century,
pneumatology became the science of the human mind, and through analogy,
the science of brute minds. By the end of the century, the term all but
disappeared and was replaced by ‘philosophy of mind’ or ‘mental philosophy’,
from which, toward the mid-nineteenth century, ‘psychology’ emerges. Thus,
pneumatology, the philosophy of spirits, ultimately gives birth to psychology,
the science of mind. Meanwhile, in the early nineteenth century, what continued
to be called pneumatology devolved into a speculative discipline dealing with
apparitions and ghosts.

From the perspective of our own times, Henry Grove, is almost invisible.

He is known, if at all, mainly for his contributions to The Spectator, for which
he was greatly admired by Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, Grove is worth

THE SELF AS SOUL

remembering, for he was a keen and original thinker. For instance, in an essay
on benevolence in The Spectator, in which he argued against Hobbes’ idea
that self-love is the root of sympathy and benevolence, Grove was an early
advo-cate of the idea that we have a natural disposition to compassion and
may even have introduced the term ‘disinterested benevolence’ into the
eighteenth-century discussion of altruism.

As indicated in the last chapter,

Grove discussed fission examples. And, as we shall see below, he was an acute
critic of Locke on personal identity, and even expressed a famous objection to
Locke that is used later by Berkeley and Reid, and for which Berkeley generally
gets the credit.

Beyond these accomplishments, Grove is useful, for present purposes, as

an example of a teacher who, in the early part of the century, was grappling
with the changes that were then just beginning to occur in pneumatology. As
such, he contrasts usefully with Reid, another teacher of pneumatology, who
we shall consider in Chapter 5. Posthumously, Groves’ writings on ethics were
published, but not his lectures on pneumatology. However, his lectures were
recorded by a student, probably in the early- to mid-1720s.

From these lecture

notes we can glimpse how pneumatology was taught during the early eighteenth
century.

Grove began by noting the transition of most interest to us, the shift in

pneumatology from an a priori to an empirical discipline. He said,
‘Pneumatology, by some styled the special part of metaphysics, by Mr. Locke
a branch of Physics or natural philosophy’, signifies ‘a discourse of spirits,
which shall also serve for the definition of the thing itself’. Grove continued
by noting that ‘the common notion of a Spirit is [of] an immaterial cogitative
Being’ and that ‘the main foundation of this Definition is the usual Belief that
a power of thinking belongs only to immaterial Substance’. Others, he says,
have been persuaded ‘that matter may think, nay probable that this is real
Fact & yt ye Soul, which is conscious to itself of its thinking, is a system or
composition of matter’. The issue, Grove thinks, turns on how Spirit is defined,
the materialists having left ‘out the consideration of its Essence; viz a Spirit is
a Being possessed of a Power of Thinking’. But which definition is better,
Grove thinks, cannot simply be intuited or laid down by fiat, but has to be
determined by inquiry (Grove 1720:1).

Grove then rehearsed the traditional taxonomy of pneumatology: ‘Human

Soul or that thinking Principle whatever it be which every man is sure he has
within him’; ‘Angelical Mind united to none or to a thin etherial Body’; ‘The
great and everblessed God’ (Ibid.: 2; emphasis added). As is clear from his
use of the placeholder, ‘whatever it be’, Grove attempted to introduce his
topic without taking sides. He mentioned Locke’s new view of pneumatology
as a natural philosophy, while also characterizing the traditional metaphysical
view.

And against the backdrop of the dominant Cartesian notion of the soul

as an immaterial thinking substance, Grove presented the hypothesis that matter
can think. He, then, proposed different definitions of spirit or soul, without

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

deciding among them. Yet since his course is clearly one intended to be about spirits,
he proposed to consider all three traditional levels of mind or spirit. As it turned out,
the human mind is the dominant topic.

Grove eventually defended his own partly a priori, partly empirical thesis that

the soul is an immaterial substance that acts independently of the body, with which
it is in union. In doing so, he considered arguments from Cartesians, Cambridge
Platonists, Locke, Clarke, and others. For instance, he argued against the Cartesian
view that the soul is essentially a thinking thing (he thought it is only accidentally a
thinking thing), but he sided with the Cartesians against Locke, in holding that the
soul is, in fact, always thinking. In defending this latter position, Grove argued
against Locke’s view that thinking does not occur during sleep, yet he rejected the
Cartesian view that the soul, in sleep, thinks independently of the body. Grove’s
position is that during sleep, imagination or irrational thinking occurs, as the body
dominates over the soul. He held that we forget this thinking because it is so irrational.

Grove criticized Locke’s account of personal identity, on the grounds that since

each act of consciousness is separate ‘there would not be one immaterial Substance:
but a train of them equal to ye number of ye several acts of thinking’. He paraphrased
Locke as replying that ‘ye same Consciousness is common to all and they will be
but one Person, one rational intelligent Being’. To which, Grove countered, aptly
enough, that ‘Mr. Lock’s Chapter of Identity and Diversity’ is so ‘plentifully stor’d
with absurdities, that tis great Pity it should have a Place in a Book of so good sense
and solid coherent Thinking’ (Grove 1720:39–40).

One of Grove’s original and interesting arguments against Locke’s theory appears

later in Berkeley and Reid:

A person any time to Day can recollect a certain act he did yesterday
and therefore is throughout this Day ye same Person he was then, before
a month perhaps is past he forgets yesterday’s action and tho assured
by others that he did it can himself remember no such thing. When
therefore he shall have forgotten what he did yesterday he will not be
ye same self he was then, but tho he forgets what he did yesterday, he
may be perfectly conscious of some thing he does to Day and will
therefore be ye same Individual Person he is to Day, but he is throughout
ye whole of this Day ye same Person he was yesterday, and if a Month
hence he will be ye same Person he was to Day and to Day he is ye
same Person he was yesterday, then a month hence he will be the same
person he was yesterday and yet he will not neither, because he will not
then be conscious of what he did yesterday.

(Ibid.: 44–5)

In sum, the problem, in Grove’s view, is that ‘If Consciousness be the ground
of Personal Identity, and where the same consciousness is wanting there no
longer remains ye same Person, a man may and may not be one and ye same
Person at the same time’ (Ibid.: 45).

THE SELF AS SOUL

Joseph Butler

Born in 1692, Butler was sent to the dissenting academy at Tewkesbury, where
as a 21-year-old student, he boldly criticized Samuel Clarke’s a priori proofs of
God’s existence. Clarke was so impressed with Butler’s criticisms that he
included and replied to them in his collected works. Subsequently he became
Butler’s long-term friend and advisor. Butler then left the academy to pursue a
career in divinity at Oxford, after which, in 1718, he obtained the position of
preacher at Rolls Chapel. Later he obtained a parsonage at Haughton, and then,
in 1725, at Stanhope, where he became even more isolated from his friends in
London. During his last year at Stanhope, his father died. There is reason to
believe that these were not happy years for Butler.

In 1733, Butler returned to

London, where he became a member of the intellectual society that was
maintained around Queen Caroline. Berkeley also was a member.

From the point of view of the story that concerns us, it is almost as if there

were two Butlers. Early-Butler wrote Sermons on Human Nature (1726), late-
Butler The Analogy of Religion (1736). Early-Butler was a natural historian of
human nature, optimistic about the prospects for empirical discoveries. Late-
Butler was distrustful of empirical investigation into human nature and sceptical
about its value. In sum, early-Butler befriended empirical inquiry, late-Butler
tried to defang it.

At the beginning of the preface to his Sermons, published three years after

the original edition of the Sermons, Butler expressed the spirit of the work as a
whole by distinguishing two paths to knowledge of morality, which he said,
‘exceedingly strengthen and enforce each other’. One, he said, takes its origin
from inquiring into ‘the abstract relations of things’, the other by examining ‘a
matter of fact, namely, what the particular nature of man is, its several parts,
their economy or constitution’. The point of the second approach, he said, is ‘to
determine what course of life it is, which is correspondent to this whole [human]
nature’. Both approaches, he wrote, would yield the same results: ‘our obligations
to the practice of virtue’. However, in the first, a priori approach, ‘the conclusion
is expressed thus, that vice is contrary to the nature and reason of things’, whereas
in the second, empirical approach, ‘that it [vice] is a violation or breaking in
upon our own nature’. Butler said that while the first is a ‘direct formal proof,
and in some respects the least liable to cavil and dispute: the latter is in a peculiar
manner adapted to satisfy a fair mind; and is more easily applicable to the several
particular relations and circumstances in life’. Butler said that in the Sermons
he would chiefly follow the second, empirical method (Butler 1726:181).

In the Sermons, Butler also follows a third approach, what today we would

call conceptual analysis. For instance, from the fact that ‘the very idea of an
interested pursuit necessarily presupposes particular passions or appetites;
since the very idea of interest or happiness consists in this, that an appetite or
affection enjoys its object’, he concluded that ‘it is not because we love
ourselves that we find delight in such and such objects, but because we have

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

particular affections toward them’ (Ibid.: 192). Thus, unlike in Butler’s own
characterization of his second, empirical method, it actually combines
empirical and a generous dose of conceptual analysis to show how human
nature is in accord with moral ideals, many of which are simply taken as
obvious.

How did Butler link human nature to this obvious morality? He supposed

that by examining humans empirically, we can discern their purpose, that is,
how nature (and ultimately God) intended that humans should function. ‘Every
work both of nature and of art’, he said, ‘is a system’ in which parts are related
to a whole. ‘And as every particular thing, both natural and artificial, is for
some use or purpose out of and beyond itself, one may add, to what has already
been brought into an idea of a system, its conduciveness to this one or several
ends’ (Ibid.: 201). Butler followed this observation by comparing human nature
to a watch. He took ‘appetites, passions, affections, and the principle of
reflection’ to be analogous to the parts of the watch. The question for him,
then, concerned how these parts must work together to function properly. One
can determine empirically, he said, that some parts are meant to be subservient
to others and, in particular, that ‘reflection or conscience’ is meant to lead:

There is a principle of reflection in men, by which they distinguish
between, approve and disapprove their own actions. We are plainly
constituted such sort of creatures as to reflect upon our own nature.
The mind can take a view of what passes within itself, its
propensions, aversions, passions, affections, as respecting such
objects, and in such degrees; and of the several actions consequent
thereupon. In this survey it approves of one, disapproves of another,
and towards a third is affected in neither of these ways, but is quite
indifferent. This principle in man, by which he approves or
disapproves his heart, temper, and actions, is conscience; for this
is the strict sense of the word, though sometimes it is used so as to
take in more. And that this faculty tends to restrain men from doing
mischief to each other, and leads them to do good, is too manifest
to need being insisted upon.

(Ibid.: 201)

Butler never questioned his assumption that in human affairs we already know
when things go as they should and when they run amok. On the basis of this
assumption, he argued that we can determine empirically that when conscience
does lead, humans function properly, that is, promote good and avoid
‘mischief’.

There are disanalogies between artifacts and humans. Chief among these is

that ‘a machine is inanimate and passive: but we are agents’. ‘Our constitution’,
Butler said, ‘is put in our own power. We are charged with it; and therefore
accountable for any disorder or violation of it’ (Ibid.: 184). Once again, there is

THE SELF AS SOUL

an easy transition in Butler’s thought between what he took to be a simple
observable fact—that we are agents and, hence, can control our behavior—to a
normative conclusion, put forth as obvious—that we are, therefore, accountable
for violations of our ‘nature’. Such, in the Sermons, are the optimistic uses for
moral ends to which the new empirical philosophy of human nature is put.

In the Analogy, published ten years later, Butler’s tone is changed. Now the

project is mainly to show that on empirical grounds one can prove very little.
Butler began by trying to shift the burden of proof from that of showing that we
survive our bodily deaths to that of showing that bodily death is the end. We are
entitled, he says, to suppose that everything continues, unless we discover some
positive reason to think that it stops. ‘This’, he said, ‘is that kind of presumption
or probability from analogy, expressed in the very word continuance, which seems
our only natural reason for believing the course of the world will continue to-morrow’.
He then inferred, rather implausibly, that this ‘shows the high probability that our
living powers will continue after death, unless there be some ground to think that
death is their destruction’ (Butler 1736:82).

Don’t we know ‘from the reason of the thing’ that when death comes, our bodies

decay? Butler conceded the point. But, what, he asked, does that have to do with
our fate? Such ‘effects [disintegration of the body] do in no wise appear to imply
the destruction of a living agent’. The key word, for Butler, in this implausible
observation, is imply. For, he said, just ‘as we are greatly in the dark, upon what the
exercise of our living powers depends, so we are wholly ignorant what the powers
themselves depend upon’. We know, from ‘sleep’ or ‘swoon’ that we can retain our
mental powers, even though we have lost the capacity to exercise them. ‘Since then
we know not at all upon what the existence of our living powers depends, this
shows further, there can no probability be collected from the reason of the thing,
that death will be their destruction: because their existence may depend upon
somewhat in no degree affected by death; upon somewhat quite out of the reach of
this king of terrors’. Nor ‘can we find any thing throughout the whole analogy of
nature, to afford us even the slightest presumption, that animals ever lose their
living powers; much less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death: for we
have no faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what
becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the sensible
proof’ (Ibid.: 83–4). On the other hand, what we do know from observing nature is
that animals and insects, as well as humans, can survive great changes other than
death. This, Butler claimed, makes it more plausible to suppose that we can also
survive the great change that comes with bodily death. It is not just that we lack
evidence, drawn from experience, for the negative conclusion that when our bodies
decay we cease. It is also, he said, that we have evidence, drawn from reason, for
the positive conclusion that we survive.

In contrast to the method he followed in the Sermons, Butler here appealed for

his supporting evidence not to empirical observation but to the Platonic argument
that destruction is decomposition and that ‘since consciousness is a single and
indivisible power…the subject in which it resides must be so too’. Thus, supposing

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

that the ‘living agent each man calls himself’ is ‘a single being, which there is at
least no more difficulty in conceiving than in conceiving it to be a compound, and
of which there is the proof now mentioned; it follows that our organized bodies are
no more ourselves or part of ourselves, than any other matter around us’. To his
credit, Butler conceded that ‘the simplicity and absolute oneness of a living agent
cannot indeed, from the nature of the thing, be properly proved by experimental
observations.’ ‘But’, he said, ‘as these fall in with the supposition of its unity, so
they plainly lead us to conclude certainly, that our gross organized bodies, with
which we perceive the objects of sense, and with which we act, are no part of
ourselves’ (Ibid.: 86–7).

Butler, more than any other eighteenth century critic of Locke, took Locke’s

observations about the role of appropriation in self-constitution seriously,
which Butler then tried to use for his own ends. It is ‘easy to conceive’, he
said, ‘how matter, which is no part of ourselves, may be appropriated to us in
the manner which our present bodies are’ (Ibid.: 86). But, he continued, where
there is appropriation, there must be an appropriator. Locke had an appropriator
in ‘man’, which he distinguished from ‘person’ and allowed might be merely
a material organism. Butler believed that he had already shown that the
appropriator must be something simple and indivisible, and, hence, could not
possibly be a material organism. This simple and indivisible appropriator, he
assumed, is who we truly are. What this being appropriates, he went on to
conclude, is not thereby part of itself, something it is, but, rather, merely
something it owns.

Butler astutely conceded that this appropriator might be a simple material

entity. But, he said, since ‘we have no way of determining by experience what
is the certain bulk of the living being each man calls himself, and yet, till it be
determined that it is larger in bulk than the solid elementary particles of matter,
which there is no ground to think any natural power can dissolve, there is no
sort of reason to think death to be the dissolution of it, of the living being,
even though it should not be absolutely indiscerpible’. And since each of us
has already ‘passed undestroyed through those many and great revolutions of
matter, so peculiarly appropriated to us ourselves; why should we imagine
death will be so fatal to us?’ (Ibid.: 87–8). Thus, Butler, although drawing on
Plato, has learned from Locke that, for all we know, the thinking principle
within us is material. Butler, in effect, adapted Plato’s argument for immortality
to the purposes of an age in which materialism was on the rise. For Butler, it
is our simplicity, not our immateriality, that ensures our survival. The a priori
had been recast in an empirical mold.

The heart of Butler’s view is his claim that our bodies are not us, but things

we own, our instruments. We are agents that use these instruments. It is as if
our bodies were artifacts—as if, in relation to them, we are pilots in a ship:
‘We see with our eyes only in the same manner as we do with glasses’. ‘Upon
the whole, then, our organs of sense and our limbs are certainly instruments,
which the living persons, ourselves, make use of to perceive and move with:

THE SELF AS SOUL

there is not any probability, that they are any more; nor consequently, that we
have any other kind of relation to them, than what we may have to any other
foreign matter formed into instruments of perception and motion, suppose
into a microscope of a staff’ (Ibid.: 89–90).

When Butler turned to the topic of personal identity per se, the story is

much the same. Here, particularly in the uses he made not only of the notion
of appropriation but also of that of concernment, he showed that he had learned
his lessons from Locke: ‘For, personal identity has been explained so by some,
as to render the inquiry concerning a future life of no consequence at all to us
the persons who are making it’ (Ibid.: 328). Butler, in response to what he
clearly saw as the dangers of empirical analysis, proposed that we take as
primitive the idea of personal identity. Like the notion of equality, he said, it
defies analysis. Just as by observing two triangles, he said, we can determine
intuitively that they are equal, so also by observing ourselves in the present
and remembering ourselves in the past, we can determine intuitively that we
have persisted, and not just in ‘a loose and popular sense’ of same, such as we
might employ in saying of a mature oak that it is the same tree as stood in its
spot fifty years previously, even though it and that former tree have not one
atom in common. Rather, we can determine that identity of persons obtains in
‘the strict and philosophical sense’, which requires sameness of substance:
‘In a loose and popular sense, then, the life, and the organization, and the
plant are justly said to be the same, not withstanding the perpetual change of
the parts. But in a strict and philosophical manner of speech, no man, no
being, no mode of being, no anything can be the same with that, with which it
hath indeed nothing the same’ (Ibid.: 330).

In Butler’s view, even though we can determine intuitively through memory

that we are the same as some person who lived earlier, our current
consciousness of that fact is not the same as our consciousness in the past.
Each episode of consciousness is a mode of the being who is conscious. The
modes come and go. The being persists. Thus, even if it were possible to
provide a conceptual or empirical analysis of personal identity, it would not
be possible to do so by appealing to sameness of consciousness, which is one
more reason, he thought, if one were needed, why Locke’s account of the
matter will not do. On the other hand, if, per impossible, our being did just
consist in successive acts of consciousness, then

‘

it must follow, that it is a

fallacy upon ourselves, to charge our present selves with anything we did, or
to imagine our present selves interested in anything which befell us yesterday;
or that our present self will be interested in what will befall us to-morrow;
since our present self is not, in reality, the same with the self of yesterday, but
another like self or person coming in its room, and mistaken for it: to which
another self will succeed tomorrow’ (Ibid.: 331–2).

In other words, in Butler’s view, if selfhood were as Locke has portrayed

it, we would have no reason to be concerned either with past or future stages
of ourselves, for these would be ourselves only in a fictitious sense; and, in an

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

apparent allusion to fission, Butler insisted that calling people to whom we
are only so related ourselves would not make them ourselves (see p. 41). But
can Butler show that the unwelcome conclusion that persons are fictions is
actually false? Not really, and he knows it. True to his method, though, he did
not feel that he had to show it. Why show what is obvious? The bare unfolding
this notion, and laying it thus naked and open, seems the best confutation of
it’ (Ibid.: 332).

In comparing Butler’s approach with those of other great philosophers of

his times, certain contrasts stand out. Unlike Locke, for instance, he was not
particularly interested in tracking down the sources of our ideas and principles
in experience. Nor was Butler interested in explaining empirically the
mechanics of self-constitution; if anything, he had a negative interest in that
sort of empirical inquiry. Otherwise, however, Butler was interested in
explaining how humans function, particularly in so far as their minds contribute
to the ways they function. However, his concern with mental functioning was
not, like Hume’s, in articulating laws of association or explaining the role,
say, that belief in our own identities plays in the formation of our attitudes
and emotions. Butler showed no interest in such questions. His passion was
not to follow the argument wherever it might lead, his objective not knowledge
for knowledge’s sake.

Butler had ulterior motives. He came to the empirical study of the mind

already armed with a traditional array of moral and metaphysical conclusions.
In this respect he was like Clarke. Yet whereas both Butler and Clarke were
intent on showing that nothing we can learn empirically will upset truths
derived from metaphysics and revelation, Clarke’s way of showing this, so
far as human mentality is concerned, was to refuse to get involved, except to
refute the views of others. By contrast, Butler, in the Sermons at least, entered
enthusiastically into the empirical investigative process. Only later, and perhaps
disillusioned, did he retreat to what may have seemed to be the relative safety
of rational psychology. However, he had such a clear-headed understanding
of the arguments of those he opposed, he may have realized that he sought
refuge in a house that is on fire. Subsequently, he retired from writing
philosophy.

Several years after Butler had published the Analogy, Hume wanted to meet

him, and tried to present him with a copy of his recently published Treatise.
There is evidence that Hume even deleted from the Treatise a chapter on
miracles because he intended to give a copy of it to Butler and thought it
might upset him. Butler was absent when Hume came to call. There is no
record of Butler’s reaction to Hume’s book. Later, Hume said in a letter, that
he heard that Butler was recommending that people read his Moral and Political
Essays. Curiously, Butler was well acquainted with David Hartley, who was a
neighbour for several years. Indeed, in 1752 Hartley was one of the physicians
who was called to treat the failing Bishop on his deathbed. As noted, Butler
was also friends with Clarke and Berkeley, from the previous era. By the time

THE SELF AS SOUL

Butler died, any attempts to justify traditional beliefs in the immaterial soul,
as he had done by ‘analogy to nature’, and as Clarke and Berkeley had done
by means of a priori arguments, no longer convinced the growing group of
more empirically oriented philosophers of human nature, which prominently
included Hume and Hartley. With Butler’s death came the end of an era in
which religion had dominated the philosophy of human nature. Henceforth,
in the eighteenth century empirical philosophy would dominate it. Later still,
but gradually and in stages, psychology would become an experimental science.

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Throughout the eighteenth century Newton’s Principia was held as an
archetype of good science. In the emerging empirical philosophy of human
nature, everyone wanted to accomplish what Newton had accomplished in
natural philosophy. Almost everyone thought it could be done. There were
two inhibiting factors. The more obvious of the two, even to most thinkers
of the time, was the continuing influence of religious beliefs. The more
subtle was a problem that is not fully resolved even in our own times: the
unhelpful mixing of what we now take to be philosophy and psychology.

Hume, the greatest of the mid-century philosophers of mind, had freed

himself from the shackles of religious belief. But he was also one of the
most indiscriminate mixers of philosophy and psychology. And he did not
even stumble into his own preferred style of mixing. He consciously
adopted it. He began by criticizing his contemporaries’ approach to the
study of human nature and then proposing a radical alternative, which was
what today we would call foundationalism. But Hume recommended
foundationalism, not only as an epistemological and metaphysical view,
but also as a scientific research program.

The best way to understand what it meant to adopt Hume’s approach as

a scientific research program is to compare it with that of other mid-century
philosophers of human nature, such as Adam Smith and Edmund Law. To
read Adam Smith on human sympathy, a topic to which Hume tried to
apply his new methods, you would hardly even know that there was such a
thing as religion or that there was anything to philosophy but ethical theory.
The uses to which Smith put his empirical inquiries into sympathy often
got in the way of his ethical theory. But unlike in the case of Hume’s
foundationalism, the complications hardly ever go the other way round.
As we shall see, it is difficult-to-impossible to separate Hume’s philosophy
from his science. But one can easily excise Smith’s ethical theory from
his empirical inquiry into sympathy without detracting from the empirical
inquiry. We shall do so below.

Edmund Law provides another interesting contrast with Hume. Although

Law was a clergyman, when it came to plumbing the depths of self and

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personal identity, he deftly marginalized both religion and all but the most
pragmatic of philosophical concerns. He was, of course, at one with Hume
in marginalizing religion. But there could hardly be a more striking contrast
than the ways in which Hume and Law incorporate philosophy into what
they hoped were properly scientific perspectives. Hume, in applying his
foundationalism to the consideration of personal identity, was led into deep
and profound complications that even he could not resolve. Law, on the
other hand, adopted a purely pragmatic, legal approach to the same topic.
So far as questions of self and personal identity are concerned, his only
foray into metaphysics is his doctrine of ‘the sleep of the soul’. But unlike
Hume’s theories, Law’s doctrine is intended not to provide new foundations
for the study of mind, but rather to clear away metaphysical debris that
blocks the way to more promising empirical approaches. Law aimed to
protect religion by freeing it from a competition that it cannot win, and to
free science by avoiding a confrontation that can only distract it from its
more promising empirical projects.

David Hume

When Locke published the Essay, he dreamt of the emergence of a science
of human nature. But in developing his account of self and personal identity,
he was under the grip of several a priori assumptions that inhibited the
development of that science. Chief among these was the Cartesian notion
that all consciousness is reflexive. In addition, Locke had ulterior motives.
Nothing is more central to his account of personal identity than his
distinction between person and man (= human), but that distinction was
an important one for him largely because it allowed him to suggest that
matter might think while at the same time accommodating the Christian
dogma of the resurrection.

When Hume published the A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he talked

as if a science of human nature had already emerged. In developing his
account of self and personal identity, he had gotten beyond both the a
priori assumption that all consciousness is reflexive and the dogma of the
resurrection. Nevertheless, he too had a dream about the new empirical
philosophy of human nature. His dream was not of its emerging but of its
assuming its rightful position among the sciences. In Hume’s view, that
position was at the foundation of a mighty edifice of human knowledge.
Whereas today we tend to think of physics as the most fundamental science,
Hume thought of the ‘science of man’ as the most fundamental. And the
reason Hume thought this is that only this new science would build an
account based on experience (rather than things), which for him was our
ultimate source both of evidence and meaning. Hence, in Hume’s view,
only this new science could include what today we would call the
foundations of epistemology and metaphysics.

‘There is no question of

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

importance’, Hume said, ‘whose decision is not comprised in the science
of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before
we become acquainted with that science’. In explaining ‘the principles of
human nature’, he continued, ‘we in effect propose a complete system of
the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one
upon which they can stand with any security’.

After making this point about the need for secure foundations, Hume lamented

the then current status of the new science of human nature. Progress has been
slow, he pointed out, and disputes abound. The remedy, he thought, was ‘to
leave the tedious lingering method’, which he thought was superficial and
piecemeal, ‘and, instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier,
to march up directly to the capital or centre of these sciences, to human nature
itself’. When once we conquer this central position, Hume waxed enthusiastically,
‘we may every where else hope for an easy victory’. And thereby we may ‘extend
our conquests over all those sciences, which more intimately concern human
life’.

How, then, to proceed to the prize: to human nature itself? The first step,

Hume thought, was to reveal the basis on which any genuine science of human
nature must be built. That, he said, is ‘experience and observation’. From our
current point of view, it may seem that Hume could not have begun more
innocently. Yet this seemingly innocent first step masked what, in retrospect,
we can see to be an important confusion. Simply put, Hume failed to distinguish
between what we would call philosophy and what we would call science—more
specifically, what we would call, on the one hand, metaphysics and epistemology
and, on the other, empirical psychology. Hume included them all, often in an
unhappy mixture, in his newly restructured science of human nature. And it
was this sort of indiscriminate mixing, as much as anything, that retarded the
growth of his new science.

Moreover, Hume’s confusion on this issue was not a peripheral mistake, but

was central to his perspective. It was because he thought that the science of
human nature—what today we would call psychology—includes philosophy
that he also thought the science of human nature was not just another science,
but the foundation of all the sciences. This new science, in his view, would not
only itself be founded on experience and observation, but—and this is how it
would be the foundation of all the sciences—would explain how all knowledge,
including whatever is discovered in any of the other sciences, also is founded
on experience and observation.

As it happened, however, for psychology to find its feet as a science it had to

abandon such epistemological and metaphysical pretensions. Its practitioners
had to realize that it was not their job, qua psychologists, to get to the absolute
bottom of things. Happily, that task could be left to philosophers. Rather, it was
their job, as psychologists, to explain human behavior. To do that, they had to
take certain things for granted that in a more philosophical frame of mind could
be seen to be deeply questionable. Since Hume stood near the beginnings of the

HUMAN NATURE

new science of human nature he was understandably confused about the need
for a division of labor. Fortunately, he did not stick consistently to his idea that
the science of human nature would be the foundation of all the sciences.
Sometimes, he seemed to see, if only through a glass darkly, that the new science
would have a different mission.

The contrast between what we are calling, somewhat anachronistically,

the philosophical and the scientific approaches is especially poignant in
Hume’s account of self and personal identity. In Book I of the Treatise, at
the heart of his account is his argument that belief in the substantial self is
an illusion. More generally, he is intent on showing that belief in the
persistence of anything is an illusion. This is what today we would call
philosophy, rather than psychology. And it is Hume, the skeptical
metaphysician, at his destructive best. In the remainder of Book I, Hume
addressed the task of explaining why people are so susceptible to the
illusion of self. And in Book II he explained how those dynamic mentalistic
systems in which we represent ourselves to ourselves, as well as to others,
actually work. In these more psychological projects, Hume took for granted
many things that in Book I he had subjected to withering skeptical criticism.
This is Hume the psychologist at his constructive best.

For the science of human nature—eventually psychology—to leave

philosophy behind, it was not, as is often suggested, just, or even primarily,
a question of psychologists learning, toward the end of the nineteenth
century, how to become experimental. Experimental design and data
collection, important as they have become, were not in the eighteenth
century the main lesson that the emerging science of human nature had to
learn. The main lesson then was how to take the right things for granted.
These were things that metaphysicians and epistemologists, especially in
Hume’s day, but even today, are loath to take for granted. Ironically,
contrary to Hume’s suggestion in his preface to the Treatise, what was
required for the new science of human nature to surge forward was not
that it become more fundamental, but that it become less so.

Hume saw it differently. In his view, it was necessary to get down to

what is fundamental, which for him were ‘impressions’, the ultimate source
of all knowledge. Locke had already argued that the ingredients of human
know-ledge—that is, the ideas in terms of which people formulate
meaningful beliefs—come from experience. However, Locke thought that
in addition to experience, rational intuition and a priori metaphysics were
in certain crucial respects sources of knowledge about the world. Hume,
by contrast, thought that only experience was a source of knowledge about
the world.

In the Treatise he even suggested that geometry is a posteriori.

In a way, Hume was right that before the new science could surge

forward, philosophers had to get to the bottom of things. His austere
phenomenalistic metaphysics and epistemology cleared the construction
site of the obstructing boulders of religion and traditional metaphysics.

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

But Hume’s metaphysics and epistemology should never have been
regarded as an essential part of the new structure. He had forged a potent
weapon of destruction that once it had done its work, was not only almost
useless for the constructive task which lay ahead, but actually became an
obstacle in its own right.

Hume’s radical empiricism, whatever we may think of it, was the source

of some of his most philosophically influential thoughts about self and
personal identity, especially of his idea that neither the notion of substance,
in general, nor that of substantial self, in particular, has a basis in
e x p e r i e n c e . I n H u m e ’ s v i ew, t h e r e a r e n o ( s i m p l e ) i m p re s s i o n s
corresponding to these ideas: ‘For my part, when I enter most intimately
into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or
other’ and ‘never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and
never can observe any thing but the perception’ (Hume 1739:252). Hence,
the ‘ideas’ of substance and of substantial self are not really even ideas
but, rather, empty words, which some misguided metaphysicians have used
to formulate mistaken (in Hume’s view, literally unintelligible) beliefs.

Since all ideas come from impressions and there is no impression of a

‘simple and continu’d’ self, there is no idea of such a self. This critique of
traditional views led Hume to formulate his alternative ‘bundle’ conception
of the self and also to compare the mind to a kind of theatre. None of the
actors— the ‘perceptions [that] successively make their appearance; pass,
re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and
situations’ —is the traditional self. None, strictly speaking, is either
‘simple’ at a time or identical over time. Beyond that, Hume claimed,
humans do not even have minds, except as fictional constructions. Thus,
although the mind may be a kind of theatre, there is one crucial respect in
which it differs from real theatres. There is, Hume says, no site for the
mental performance, at least none of which we can have knowledge; that
is, so far as we know, the mind does not even exist! Rather, there ‘are the
successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most
distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the
materials, of which it is compos’d’ (Ibid.: 253).

With these philosophical preliminaries out of the way, Hume turned to

the psychological task of explaining how objects that are constantly
c h a n g i n g , i n c l u d i n g t h e m a t e r i a l s o u t o f w h i c h w e o u r s e l ve s a r e
constructed, nevertheless seem to persist. He asked, ‘What then gives us
so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions,
and to suppose ourselves possest of an invariable and uninterrupted
existence thro’ the whole course of our lives?’ Before answering this
question, he distinguished ‘betwixt personal identity, as it regards our
thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we
take in ourselves’. He added that the first of these issues—personal identity,
as it regards our thought or imagination— ‘is our present subject’ and that

HUMAN NATURE

‘to explain it perfectly we must take the matter pretty deep’. Among other
things, that meant to him that we must account for the identity that we
attribute to plants and animals, ‘there being a great analogy betwixt it,
and the identity of a self or person’ (Ibid.).

What, though, is the difference that Hume had in mind in distinguishing

between his two ways of regarding personal identity? It is between, on the
one hand, explaining why we regard anything that changes, including
ourselves, as persisting over time (this is personal identity as it regards
our thought or imagination); and, on the other, explaining the role that
belief in ourselves as things that persist plays in the ways we represent
ourselves to ourselves and to others (this is personal identity as it regards
our passions or the concern we take in ourselves). The first of these
questions occupies Hume in most of the remainder of Book I. The second
occupies him in most of Book II.

In explaining personal identity as it regards our thought or imagination,

the crucial psychological question for Hume was that of figuring out what
causes us to forge a succession of perceptions into a persisting object. His
answer is one word: resemblance. That, Hume said, ‘is the cause of the
confusion and mistake, and makes us substitute the notion of identity,
instead of that of related objects’. When successive perceptions resemble
each other, he said, it is easy to imagine that the first simply persists. In
fact, ‘our propensity to this mistake’ is so ubiquitous and strong ‘that we
fall into it before we are aware’. And even when we become aware of our
error ‘we cannot long sustain our philosophy, or take off this biass from
the imagination’. So, we suppose that objects that change persist. In and
of itself, Hume suggested, that is not so bad. But ‘in order to justify to
ourselves this absurdity’, we make up a story, often one in which the
principle character is the notion of substance; that is, we invent the fictions
of ‘soul, and self, and substance to disguise the variation’ in our
perceptions. When, as in the case of ‘plants and vegetables’, we cannot
fool ourselves into believing that the persistence of an underlying substance
accounts for the persistence of the organism, we invent an equally
‘unknown and mysterious’ surrogate—presumably, Hume here means ‘life’,
as in the views of Hobbes and Locke—to connect the successive and
different perceptions (Ibid.: 254–5).

Later Hume would claim—probably at least with Locke’s prince and

cobbler example in mind—that ‘all the nice and subtile questions
concerning personal identity’ are merely verbal. In the present context,
though, he insisted that ‘the controversy concerning identity is not merely
a dispute of words’. Usually, he continued, when people attribute identity
‘to variable or interrupted objects’ their ‘mistake’ is ‘attended with a
fiction’ (Ibid.: 255). They believe that the identity, which they have claimed
obtains, is not just their (perhaps pragmatically motivated) decision to
regard distinct but similar, objects as the same. Rather, they believe that

NATURALIZATION OF THE SOUL

those objects really are the same, perhaps even that what makes them the
same is the existence of some unifying substance, such as soul, or some
unifying mode, such as life or consciousness. Thus, in Hume’s view,
normally it is not just that someone, in full knowledge of the facts,
innocently chooses to call distinct objects which resemble each other the
same object, but rather that the person who chooses to do this is immersed
in a cloud of metaphysical confusion.

Hume then committed himself to the view, which he may well have

gotten from Locke, that ‘any mass of matter, of which the parts are
contiguous and connected’, remains the same just if no part of it is
subtracted or foreign part added (even if the particles are rearranged). Yet
if the alteration in the mass of matter is ‘trivial’, Hume said, ‘we scruple
not’ to pronounce it the same since the passage of our thought from the
earlier to the later object is ‘so smooth and easy’ (Ibid.: 255–6).

What affects whether the passage of our thought is smooth and easy?

Resemblance, of course, but subject to these additional considerations:
first, the size of the change relative to the size of the whole (rather than
merely the absolute size of the change); second, whether the change is
gradual and insensible (rather than sudden and obvious); third, whether
the various parts of the objects under consideration have a ‘reference’ to
each other, as they would have if they contributed ‘to some common end
or purpose’; and, fourth, whether there is ‘a sympathy of parts to their
common end’, that is, whether there is a ‘reciprocal relation of cause and
effect in all their actions and operations’, such as obtains, say, in the case
of plants and animals (Ibid.: 257).

In addition, Hume pointed out that when distinct objects are related to

a common cause, we have a tendency to confuse ‘specific’ with ‘numerical
identity’, as may happen when we regard as the same a continuing noise
‘that is frequently interrupted and renewed’ or as the same a church that
burns down and then is rebuilt. Finally, ‘where the objects are in their
nature changeable and inconstant’ —in the case, say, of rivers changing
their water— ‘we admit of a more sudden transition, than wou’d otherwise
be consistent with that relation’. That is, we allow that such objects persist,
even though we would regard comparable changes in more stable objects
as bringing about their cessation (Ibid.: 258).

As we saw in Chapter 2, it seems from Hume’s discussion of the church

example that he may have been aware of the special problems for judgments
of identity that arise in the case of fission. Hume clearly did take the view
that we can explain personal identity on the same principles as we would
explain the identities of all other ‘compounded and changeable’ things
and that personal identity is equally illusory: ‘the identity which we ascribe
to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’ (Ibid.: 259). Whether fission
examples eased Hume’s way to this conclusion is unknown.

However, he

was sensitive to the objection that in showing that personal identity is

HUMAN NATURE

relational, rather than substantial, he had not thereby shown that it is
fictitious. So, Hume continued by noting that ‘a question naturally arises
concerning this relation of identity; whether it be something that really
binds our several perceptions together or only associates their ideas in the
imagination’; that is, ‘whether in pronounc-ing concerning the identity of
a person, we observe some real bond among his perceptions, or only feel
one among the ideas we form of them’? The issue, Hume claimed, ‘we
might easily decide’. It is enough if we remember that ‘the understanding
never observes any real connexion among objects’. ‘Even the union of
cause and effect’, he added, ‘when strictly examin’d, resolves itself into a
customary association of ideas’ (Ibid.: 259–60).

Here, Hume seems to draw conclusions from philosophy for empirical

psychology. For instance, in his view, since we know from epistemology
that causation cannot be anything more than constant conjunction, the only
remaining task is to explain why we tend mistakenly to attribute more
than that to causal relationships, not only in general but in specific cases.
For such explanations Hume retreats to his thesis that the only relations
between objects that we can observe are resemblance and contiguity. So,
he assumes, the explanation must lie there. Resemblance and contiguity
are all there is to causation since they are all that there can be to it. This is
Hume the philosopher.

However, In Book II of the Treatise, Hume proposed specific causal

theses: for instance, ones having to do with interactions between pride or
sympathy and systems of self-representation. In justifying these more
specific causal theses, it does not do to retreat to talk of resemblance and
contiguity, as he sometimes attempts to do, any more than in this more
realistic context it would do to think of minds merely as fleeting systems
of sensory impressions which come and then go ‘with an inconceivable
rapidity’. The world of psychological science, like the world of everyday
life, is a world of relatively stable objects and relationships. Confirmation
in psychology is carried out within, not beneath, this realistic context.

From the fact that we never observe any real bond among our

perceptions, ‘it evidently follows’, Hume continued, ‘that identity is
nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them
together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them, because of
the union of their ideas in the imagination, when we reflect upon them’.
Resemblance, contiguity, and causation ‘are the uniting principles in the
ideal world, and without them every distinct object is separable by the
mind, and may be separately consider’d, and appears not to have any more
connexion with any other object, than if disjoin’d by the greatest difference
and remoteness’. It is, then, Hume concluded, on one or more of these
three relations ‘that identity depends; and as the very essence of these
relations consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas; it follows,
that our notions of personal identity, proceed entirely from the smooth

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and uninterrupted progress of the thought along a train of connected ideas,
according to the principles above explain’d’ (Ibid.: 260).

So, which of these three relations comes into play when we consider the

‘successive existence of mind or thinking person’? Not contiguity, Hume said.
That leaves only resemblance and cause and effect. With regard to resemblance,
he considered the case of someone who retains the same memories, which, of
course, resemble each other over time. That is, if you remembered yesterday an
event that, happened a year ago and then remembered today, in the same way,
that same event, then the two memories, considered just as mental phenomena
in the present, would resemble each other. In such a case, Hume said, ‘the
memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production,
by producing the relations of resemblance among the perceptions’ (Ibid.: 261).
In other words, whereas for Locke memory produced personal identity by
ensuring sameness of consciousness, for Hume it pro-motes the fiction of
personal identity by producing resemblances among successive conscious states.

So far, so good. But when Hume turned next to causality, his language became

more realistic. He said that ‘we may observe that the true idea of the human
mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences,
which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually
produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other’. Impressions give rise to
ideas which, in turn, give rise to still further impressions. ‘One thought chases
another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expelled in its turn’. Hume then
famously mused:

I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a
republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united
by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give
rise to other persons who propagate the same republic in the incessant
changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not
only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like
manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as
well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity.
Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected
by the relation of causation.

(Ibid.: 261)

Here, it sounds as if Hume’s project were to recommend a relational theory of
personal identity, rather than to explode its pretensions. However, it is unclear
whether he intended such apparently realistic causal talk to be interpreted in the
light of his earlier skeptical pronouncements or whether he is here revealing,
perhaps without even recognizing that he is doing so, that in accounting for the
unity of the mind, he is not himself of one mind.

In Locke’s view, memory played a crucial role in constituting personal

identity. In Hume’s view, it does so also, but for different reasons:

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As memory alone acquaints us with the continuance and extent of
this succession of perceptions, it is to be considered, upon that
account chiefly, as the source of personal identity. Had we no
memory, we never should have any notion of causation, nor
consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute
our self or person. But having once acquired this notion of causation
from the memory, we can extend the same chain of causes, and
consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory, and
can comprehend times, and circumstances, and actions, which we
have entirely forgot, but suppose in general to have existed.

(Ibid.: 261–2)

So, in Hume’s view, memory contributes to producing personal identity not
only by creating resemblances among successive perceptions but also by
revealing to us that our perceptions are causally linked. However, once we see
that our perceptions are causally linked, we then use this new information as a
basis for extending our identities to periods of our lives that we do not remember.

Hume then brought up the topic of forgetfulness: ‘Who can tell me, for

instance, what were his thoughts and actions on the 1st of January 1715, the
11th of March 1719 and the 3rd of August 1733? Or will he affirm, because he
has entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the
same person with the self of that time; and by that means overturn all the most
established notions of personal identity?’ Hume said that, in his view, which
presumably he intended to contrast with the views of Locke and perhaps also
Collins, ‘memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by
shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions’
and that ‘it will be incumbent on those who affirm that memory produces entirely
our personal identity, to give a reason why we can thus extend our identity
beyond our memory’ (Ibid.: 262).

Hume extended his critique by questioning the seriousness of trying to make

fine-grained distinctions, perhaps especially in the case of specially contrived,
hypothetical examples, such as Locke’s prince and cobbler example, about
whether personal identity obtains. He said, ‘Identity depends on the relations of
ideas; and these relations produce identity, by means of that easy transition they
occasion. But as the relations, and the easiness of the transition may diminish
by insensible degrees, we have no just standard by which we can decide any
dispute concerning the time when they acquire or lose a title to the name of
identity’. It follows, Hume said, that ‘all the disputes concerning the identity of
connected objects are merely verbal, except so far as the relation of parts gives
rise to some fiction or imaginary principle of union’ (Ibid.).

In sum, Hume’s view seems to be that disputes about identity are merely

verbal, if they are about which relations, were they to obtain, would constitute
identity. But the disputes are based on substantive mistakes, if the disputants
suppose that what is merely successive is really the same. In any case, the disputes

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are about fictitious imaginary constructs. That is all there is to identity over
time and through changes.

Thus, Hume may have thought that a crucial difference between Locke and

himself on the question of personal identity is that whereas Locke thought that
there is a fact of the matter about whether a person persists, Hume did not, but
rather thought that there is a fact of the matter only about the circumstances
under which the illusion of persistence is nourished. In his capacity as a
psychologist, Hume tried to explain what those circumstances were. But he did
not stop there. As soon as he moved on to the largely psychological concerns
that dominate Book II of the Treatise, he became deeply involved in what today
we would call social psychology of the self. In doing so, he abandoned, but
probably without realizing that he had done so, the project of marching up
directly to ‘the capital or centre of the sciences, to human nature itself’. In his
capacity as social psychologist of the self, Hume returned to ‘the frontier’.

The transition, in Hume’s thought, from skeptical philosophy to the most

general sorts of associational issues, and then to specific psychological
hypotheses about how self-representations function in our mental economy
can be nicely illustrated in terms of one of Hume’s less complicated, but
from our point of view, more interesting discussions in Book II, his short
chapter, ‘Of the Love of Fame’ (Ibid.: 316–24). Here, Hume said that
besides the more basic causes of pride and humility, which previously in
Book II he had already discussed, there is in the opinions of others a
‘secondary’ cause of pride, ‘which has an equal influence on the affections’.
‘ O u r r e p u t a t i o n , o u r c h a r a c t e r, o u r n a m e ’ , H u m e c o n t i n u e d , ‘ a r e
considerations of vast weight and importance; and even the other causes
of pride, virtue, beauty, and riches, have little influence, when not seconded
by the opinions and sentiments of others’. However, he added, to explain
why the love of fame is so important, it will be necessary to ‘first explain
the nature of sympathy’ (Ibid.: 316).

For our purposes, three things about Hume’s conception of sympathy

are especially interesting. The first is that in the case of some of Hume’s
examples, it seems that what he means by sympathy is what today we would
call emotional contagion. That is, it seems that we catch another’s emotions
more or less as we might catch their colds, by intimate contact: ‘A good-
natured man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his
company’. ‘A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and
serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden damp
u p o n m e . H a t r e d , r e s e n t m e n t , e s t e e m , l ove , c o u r a g e , m i r t h , a n d
melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication, than from
my own natural temper and disposition’ (Ibid.: 317). In other words, in
the case of many mental states, one person’s being in that state and in
proximity to another greatly increases the likelihood that the other will
also be in that state. However, in explaining how this process works, Hume
goes considerably beyond a merely external descriptive account.

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How, then, does sympathy happen? Hume said that we infer (implicitly

and unconsciously?) the mental states of others from observing their bodies
and behavior: ‘any affection’ that ‘is infused by sympathy’ is ‘at first known
only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and
conversation, which convey an idea of it’. Then, the idea of whatever mental
state we take others to be in is ‘converted into an impression, and acquires
such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself,
and produce an equal emotion as any original affection’ (Ibid.).

But how are such ideas converted into impressions? In perhaps his most

curious remark in the Treatise, Hume said, ‘It is evident that the idea, or
rather impression of ourselves is always intimately present with us, and that
our consciousness gives us so lively a conception of our own person, that it
is not possible to imagine that any thing can in this particular go beyond it’
(Ibid.). What is so curious about this remark is that, in Book I, Hume had
made quite a show of revealing that we have no impression of self, at least
none corresponding to what some philosophers had understood by self. Now,
rather surprisingly, Hume reveals that we do after all have an impression of
self, and not just any old impression, but one that is quite extraordinary. We
have an impression of self that is always with us and that is as lively as any
impression could possibly be. Yet, Hume offered not a word of explanation
about what this impression is like, or how it compares to the impression of
self which he earlier claimed we do not have, or why our having the
impression of self which he now says we have could (or could not) have
misled us into thinking that we also have the supposed impression of self
which he earlier argued we do not have.

The rest of Hume’s explanation is almost as puzzling, but primarily for

its ambiguity and seeming inconsistency. Hume said:

Whatever object, therefore, is related to ourselves, must be
conceived with a like vivacity of conception, according to the
foregoing principles; and though this relation should not be so
strong as that of causation, it must still have a considerable
influence. Resemblance and contiguity are relations not to be
neglected; especially when, by an inference from cause and effect,
and by the observation of external signs, we are informed of the
real existence of the object, which is resembling or contiguous.

(Ibid.: 317–8)

In these remarks, when Hume said, ‘whatever object’, which object did he
have in mind? It may seem that he was here referring to a mental state that
one person has ‘caught’ from another. But what he then said in the next
para-graph suggests that the object that he had in mind is the other person
himself. Whatever ‘object’ Hume had in mind, in his view, it ‘must be
conceived with a like vivacity of conception, according to the foregoing

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principles’. But which principles are those—the ones he has just explained,
having to do with emotional contagion, or ones he had earlier explained,
having to do with pride and humility? Either way, and regardless of which
object Hume had in mind, it is difficult to make sense of the quoted remarks.
And when he added, ‘Though this relation should not be so strong as that of
causation, it must still have a considerable influence’ we are left completely
in the dark. Non-causal influence! What will Hume think of next?

Hume continued by remarking that just as different peoples’ bodies are

basically alike, so also are their minds, ‘and this resemblance must very
much contribute to make us enter into the sentiments of others, and embrace
them with facility and pleasure’. In addition to such general similarities
among people, there may, in particular cases, be some ‘peculiar similarity
in our manners, or character, or country, or language’ and, if there is, then
this too ‘facilitates the sympathy’. So, ‘the stronger the relation is betwixt
ourselves and any object, the more easily does the imagination make the
transition, and convey to the related idea the vivacity of conception, with
which we always form the idea of our own person’ (Ibid.: 318).

In sum, Hume’s explanation, in this part of the Treatise, of how sympathy

works is that it involves two steps. First, we infer what another’s mental
state is from observing his external appearance and behavior, and thereby
introduce into our own minds the idea of his state. Second, we bring that
idea of the other’s state into ‘proximity’ with our own vivacious and
ongoing impression of ourselves, and thereby upgrade the idea of the
other’s state into an impression, in the process converting it into one of
our own mental states, say, our own cheerfulness, rather than merely our
idea of another’s cheerfulness. Ironically, in so far as the mechanism for
sympathy that Hume postulates involves what today we would call
emotional contagion, Hume suggested that the real emotional contagion is
not between ourselves and another, but wholly internal to ourselves. We
acquire our idea of the other’s mental state by means of inference, not
emotional contagion. The contagion, to the extent that it is involved in the
mechanism of sympathy, is not inter-personal but intra-personal, that is, it
occurs internally to one individual, when that individual upgrades an idea
into an impression. And an idea is thus upgraded by its ‘catching’ the
vivacity of our ongoing impressions of ourselves.

But unlike in the simplest cases of emotional contagion—for instance,

when one baby cries because it is put down next to another crying baby—
Hume obviously thought that sympathy involved one’s imagining an actual
or possible internal state of the other.

This becomes particularly clear,

later in the Treatise, in Hume’s section, ‘Of the mixture of benevolence
and anger with compassion and malice’, where he introduced a variation
on the first step of his two-step account of how sympathy works. Instead
of saying that the initial occasion of sympathy is an inference we make to
another’s mental state based on observing him, Hume allows that ‘we often

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feel by communication the pains and pleasures of others, which are not in
being, and which we only anticipate by the force of imagination’. To
illustrate what he has in mind, Hume says, ‘supposing I saw a person
perfectly unknown to me, who, while asleep in the fields, was in danger of
being trod under foot by horses, I shou’d immediately run to his assistance;
and in this I shou’d be actuated by the same principle of sympathy, which
makes me concern’d for the present sorrows of a stranger’ (Ibid.; 385). In
a case like the one in this example, one does not merely infer what the
other is feeling, but must imagine what the other would be feeling under
certain unrealized conditions, or perhaps what the other ought to be feeling
under certain unrealized conditions, which are obviously imaginative
activities. But so also is imagination involved in the standard case in which
one infers what another person is currently feeling. Both sorts of cases
contrast sharply with the simplest examples of emotional contagion (e.g.,
the crying babies), in which another’s external behavior simply causes
one to behave similarly.

Returning now to Hume’s account in his section on ‘the love of fame’,

he said that other relations besides mental resemblance between ourselves
and others can add ‘new force’ to sympathy: The sentiments of others have
little influence when far removed from us, and require the relation of
contiguity to make them communicate themselves entirely’. Returning,
next, to more realistic causal talk, he noted that biological relations also
matter: The relations of blood, being a species of causation, may sometimes
contribute to the same effect; as also acquaintance’. Such relations, when
combined, ‘convey the impression or consciousness of our own person to
the idea of the sentiments or passions of others, and makes us conceive
them in the strongest and most lively manner’ (Ibid.: 318).

Hume said that since there is no difference between impressions and

ideas except for ‘different degrees of their force and vivacity’ and since
‘this difference may be removed, in some measure, by a relation betwixt
the impressions and ideas, it is no wonder an idea of a sentiment or passion
may by this means be so enlivened as to become the very sentiment or
passion’:

The lively idea of any object always approaches its impression;
and it is certain we may feel sickness and pain from the mere
force of imagination, and make a malady real by often thinking
of it. But this is most remarkable in the opinions and affections;
and it is there principally that a lively idea is converted into an
impression. Our affections depend more upon ourselves, and
the internal operations of the mind, than any other impressions;
for which reason they arise more naturally from the imagination,
and from every lively idea we form of them.

(Ibid.)

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Hume concluded that ‘this is the nature and cause of sympathy; and it is
after this manner we enter so deep into the opinions and affections of others,
whenever we discover them’. Continuing in his role as social psychologist,
Hume then went on to elaborate his account of the ways in which attendant
circumstances affect our mechanisms of sympathy; for instance, he pointed
out that ‘though fame in general be agreeable, yet we receive a much greater
satisfaction from the approbation of those whom we ourselves esteem and
approve of, than of those whom we hate and despise’. But there is little in
all of this that affects his account of how sympathy works, as an internal
mechanism.

What, for present purposes, is chiefly interesting about Hume’s account

of sympathy is the way in which he tried to formulate a dynamic model of
mental operations in which the conception of self plays a role. The fact
that he did this at all, and some of the details of the way that he did it,
suggest that he had a sophisticated understanding of self-conceptions in
general, and of sympathy in particular. And, as we have seen, often he did.
But sometimes he did not. For instance, in his section, ‘of the pride and
humility of animals’, he remarked that ‘almost in every species of creatures,
but especially of the nobler kind, there are many evident marks of pride
and humility’. For instance:

The very port and gait of a swan, or turkey, or peacock show
the high idea he has entertain’d of himself, and his contempt of
all others. This is the more remarkable, that in the last species
of animals, the pride always attends the beauty, and is discover’d
in the male only. The vanity and emulation of nightingales in
singing have been commonly remark’d.

(Ibid.: 326)

What passages such as these show is that Hume, for all his sophistication
about self-conceptions, was still a long way from considering, let alone
u n d e r s t a n d i n g , t h e t r u e m e c h a n i s m s o f h ow i d e a s o f s e l f a r i s e
developmentally. In sum, when it came to understanding self-conceptions—
what they are, how they arise, what roles they play in our mental lives, and
so on—Hume, though often amazingly perceptive, could also be quite
naive.

Adam Smith

Smith, who was a good friend and confidant of Hume, took over the post
at the University of Glasgow of his former teacher, Hutcheson, when the
latter retired. Ultimately Smith would make his mark as an economist.
But, his first love was moral psychology. His lectures at Glasgow led to a

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book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1859), in which he put forth such
a perceptive and rich account of sympathy that, had his book been more
influential, it might have been to sympathy what Locke’s account of
personal identity was to that topic.

In its being sensitive both to the internal complexity of sympathy and

to the great variety of guises in which it appears, Smith’s account was
light-years ahead of that of Hutcheson and even a clear advance on that of
Hume. And, unlike Hume, Smith managed to investigate the phenomenon
of sympathy scientifically, in a way that did not require a statement of his
epistemological and metaphysical views. Nevertheless, Smith did have what
today we would regard as philosophical concerns, having to do with ethical
theory, and even to a large extent constructed his account in the service of
these concerns. But these normative philosophical concerns, at least in
Smith’s hands, were much less intrusive than metaphysics and epistemology
had been in Hume’s.

Nevertheless, commentators on Smith, from Reid to the present day,

often miss the empirical richness of Smith’s account of sympathy by being
overly concerned with the ways in which its unclarities complicate the
uses to which he tried to put it for purposes of ethical theory.

In our view,

if one leaves ethical theory to one side and focuses just on Smith’s account
of sympathy as a psychological phenomenon, one of the great virtues of
his account—arguably its greatest virtue—is his extraordinary sensitivity
to that phenomenon.

Smith was the first to draw attention to the ways in which differences

of degree in the extent to which people sympathize with others complicate
how we should account for sympathy. Although the issue is implicit
throughout his discussion, in the context of making the point that sympathy
is not ‘a selfish principle’ he raised it explicitly. ‘When I sympathize with
your sorrow or your indignation’, he said, ‘it may be pretended indeed,
that my emotion is founded in self-love, because it arises from bringing
your case home to myself, from putting myself in your situation, and thence
conceiving what I should feel in the like circumstances’. ‘But’, he
continued, ‘though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an
imaginary change of situation with the person principally concerned, yet
this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person
and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize’. For
instance, ‘when I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order
to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character
and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was
unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really
you, and I not only change circumstance with you, but I change persons
and characters’ (Smith 1759:317).

What is most perceptive about these remarks is Smith’s recognition that

in imagining yourself in another’s situation, you can do so to different

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degrees. In some cases, you just imagine yourself in the other’s situation
by altering circumstances external to your person—say, having to do with
familial relations and the fates of people you care about. In other cases,
you imagine yourself in the other’s situation by altering your own ‘person
and character’. When Smith talks of his becoming ‘really you’ and
‘changing persons’, sometimes he seems to mean merely that in imagination
he would cross the boundary between mere external circumstances and
internal ones; that is, he would alter not only circumstances external to his
person but also his own person and character. Other times, Smith talks as
if, in imagination, he would ‘really [become] you’, retaining no vestige of
himself. On balance, Smith usually seems to mean just the former. But he
is ambiguous enough that there is no way to be absolutely sure. What we
can be sure of is that Smith was alive to the issue.

We shall not here attempt to give a complete summary of Smith’s account

of sympathy. We want merely to illustrate some of the ways in which, like
Hume in Book II of the Treatise, Smith entered wholeheartedly into the
project of constructing a dynamic model of some of those mental systems
in which the line between self and other is an issue. In discussing Hume,
we viewed him, in part, through the lens of a contemporary distinction
between the philosophy and psychology of personal identity that is current
in our own times. We pointed out that Hume had a foot in both camps.
Leaving aside Smith’s ethical theory, if we view through the same lens his
account of sympathy as a mental and behavioral phenomenon, his account
falls squarely on the psychological side of the ledger. Smith exhibited little
interest in the sorts of foundational issues with regard to personal identity
(or, any other epistemological or metaphysical topic) that preoccupied
Locke and Hume. Smith’s focus was on characterizing how our minds
actually work.

Smith had two central preoccupations that permeated his entire account.

One, which we will not stress, has to do with selfishness. He was intent on
showing that, so far as our natural propensities are concerned, we are not
completely selfish. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed’, he began his
book, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in
the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he
derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it’. Smith said, ‘Of this
kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others,
when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner’. Smith’s
target, in this part of what he has to say, was pretty obviously Hobbes (and
perhaps also Locke and Mandeville), his heroes pretty obviously Hutcheson
and Hume, though Smith is not explicit on the point. For the most part, he
discussed issues and examples, not persons or theories. He rarely named names.

Smith’s other central preoccupation was with accounting for the mechanics

of sympathy, which he did mainly by commenting on examples. He said that
since ‘we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form

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no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we
ourselves should feel in the like situation’. If ‘our brother is upon the rack’, he
said, we discover what he suffers not by our senses, which cannot ‘carry us
beyond our own person’, but by our imaginations, which help us to form an
idea of what another experiences ‘by representing to us what would be our own
[experience], if we were in his case’. ‘By means of imagination, ‘we place
ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments,
we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person
with him’. Thereby, we ‘form some idea of his sensations, and even feel
something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’ (Ibid.:
9, emphasis added). Thus, in an important respect, Smith is squarely in the
tradition of Hume. In imagination we replicate the impressions of the person
with whom we are sympathetic, to which we have no direct access, by means of
our own past or present impressions. And we determine which of our own
impressions to bring into play by imagining ourselves in the other’s external
circumstances and perhaps also in adopting some of his internal characteristics.
Smith concluded that once we have done this, the other’s ‘agonies, when they
are thus brought home to ourselves…begin at last to affect us, and we then
tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels’ (Ibid.).

Smith is aware that sometimes sympathy is simply emotional contagion. He

said that sympathy ‘may be seen to arise merely from the view of a certain
emotion in another person’. In such cases, passions ‘may seem to be trans-
fused from one man to another, instantaneously and antecedent to any knowledge
of what excited them in the person principally concerned’. For instance, when
grief or joy is ‘strongly expressed in the look and gestures of any one’, they ‘at
once affect the spectator with some degree of a like painful or agreeable emotion.
A smiling face is, to every body that sees it, a cheerful object; as a sorrowful
countenance, on the other hand, is a melancholy one’ (Ibid.: 11). Yet Smith was
much more interested in the forms of sympathy which are not instantaneous
and depend on the sympathizer’s precon-ceptions.

Smith distinguished a variety of examples, among them the case in which

we simply react to imagining ourselves in the other’s situation, but with
our own current awareness of what is happening to him or is about to happen
to him. In some cases, our and the other person’s awareness of the situation
might be alike in relevant respects: ‘the mob, when they are gazing at a
dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own
bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if
in his situation’. In other cases, our awareness might be superior to that of
the person with whom we sympathize: when we see an object about to fall
on another’s leg, then, whether or not he also sees it, ‘we shrink and draw
back our own leg’ and when the object ‘does fall, we feel it in some
measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer’. In his discussion of
such examples, Smith showed that he is aware of sympathy as a bodily
phenomenon. ‘Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body

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complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by
beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in
the correspondent part of their own bodies’. And Smith showed that he is
aware of what we might call the counter-factual character of sympathy:
‘horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they
really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular
part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner’
(Ibid.: 10).

It is not just pain or negative mental states that call forth ‘our fellow-

feeling’ and it is not even just information about real others that calls it
forth. Positive emotions, such as joy, even ‘our joy for the deliverance of
those heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us’, is, Smith said, ‘as
sincere as our grief for their distress’. He added that, ‘in every passion of
which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always
correspond to that, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines
should be the sentiments of the sufferer’. And, yet, Smith pointed out,
some passions more easily provoke sympathy than others. ‘The furious
behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself
than against his enemies’ since ‘we are un-acquainted with his provocation’.
But since ‘we plainly see what is the situation of those with whom he is
angry, and to what violence they may be exposed from so enraged an
adversary’ we readily ‘sympathize with their fear or resentment’. Thus,
our knowing what provokes a passion can affect whether we sympathize.
In situations in which we may have to choose with whom we should be
sympathetic, our being able to see the source of another’s passion makes
it easier to sympathize with him. But in the case of such examples, it is not
just knowledge of causes, Smith thought, that determines with whom we
sympathize but also the kind of passion involved. ‘The very appearances
of grief and joy’, for instance, ‘inspire us with some degree of the like
emotions’ because ‘they suggest to us the general idea of some good or
bad fortune that has befallen the person in whom we observe them’ (Ibid.:
10–11).

Yet even in the case of emotions with which we are disposed to be

sympathetic, Smith thought, background information—for example, with
respect to what causes the emotion—plays a key role in determining
whether we actually are sympathetic: ‘Even our sympathy with the grief
or joy of another, before we are informed of the cause of either, is always
extremely imperfect’. And ‘general lamentations, which express nothing
but the anguish of the sufferer, create rather a curiosity to inquire into his
situation, along with some disposition to sympathize with him, than any
actual sympathy’. In Smith’s opinion, sympathy ‘does not arise so much
from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites
it’, where what he means by ‘the view’ is our general understanding of the
situation (Ibid.: 11–12).

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In some cases of sympathetic reaction, our knowledge of the situation

might be superior to that of the person with whom we sympathize not, as
in the example of the object about to strike someone’s leg, because we,
but not the person, know what is about to happen, but because we know
what the person with whom we sympathize ought to feel: ‘We blush for
the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have
no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help
feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we
behaved in so absurd a manner’ (Ibid.: 12). Clearly, Smith saw in sympathy
an extremely complicated mental operation. It is not even, he thought,
that, in sympathy, rather than feeling what we imagine others are actually
feeling, we feel instead what we would be feeling if we were in their
situations. Rather, in some cases at least, we feel what we would be feeling,
if we were in the other’s situation, subject to the qualification that we are
simultaneously able to view ourselves from our present perspective. Smith,
thus, built into his model of how sympathy works a related and quite
sophisticated model of mental dissociation.

Smith illustrated this dissociative aspect of sympathy in terms of three

additional examples, the first of which has to do with insanity: ‘Of all the
calamities to which the condition of mortality exposes mankind, the loss
of reason appears, to those who have the least spark of humanity, by far
the most dreadful’. But ‘the poor wretch, who is in it, laughs and sings
perhaps, and is altogether insensible of his own misery’. Smith concluded
that ‘the anguish which humanity feels, therefore, at the sight of such an
object, cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer’. Rather,
‘ t h e c o m p a s s i o n o f t h e s p e c t a t o r m u s t a r i s e a l t o g e t h e r f r o m t h e
consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same
unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time
able to regard it with his present reason and judgment’ (Ibid.: 12, emphasis
added). Smith next considered sympathy with infants, in which the same
sort of considerations arise.

Finally, Smith considered the interesting case of sympathizing with the

dead:

And overlooking what is of real importance in their situation,
that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by
those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no
influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be
deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and
conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption
and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this
world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections,
and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and
relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for

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those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of
our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are
in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours
which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery,
artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their
misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation
seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we
can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress,
the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can
yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of
their misery.

(Ibid.: 12–13)

Yet, Smith insisted, the happiness of the dead is unaffected by such
circumstances

Smith said that in the case of the dead, the sympathizer’s feelings arise

not only, as in other cases of sympathy, from our putting ourselves in the
other’s situation but, rather, from ‘our lodging, if I may be allowed to say
so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving
what would be our emotions’ (Ibid.: 13). In other words, our feelings arise
not from imagining what the dead actually feel or even what we would feel
if we were in their situation but, rather, what we would feel if we were
buried alive, paralysed but fully conscious, thought to be dead by all of our
friends and acquaintances, with no hope whatsoever of escape. Thus, we
despair but not so much for the dead, or even for their condition, as for
ourselves. In sympathizing with the dead, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, we
rage, as it were, at the dying of the light.

Clearly, Smith had come a long way from merely viewing sympathy as

emotional contagion, and he was as concerned with how sympathy affects
us as he was with how it works. In particular, he was concerned with what
he called, ‘the pleasure of mutual sympathy’, the fact that ‘nothing pleases
us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions
of our own breast’ nor ‘shocks’ us more than the observation of its absence.
Smith saw in this phenomenon an expression of our deepest values, which,
he thought, give the lie to egoism. According to the thinkers Smith hoped to
refute, especially Hobbes and Mandeville, because ‘man’ is ‘conscious of
his own weakness, and of the need which he has for the assistance of others’,
he ‘rejoices whenever he observes that they adopt his own passions’, for he
is then assured of their assistance; and he ‘grieves whenever he observes the
contrary, because he is then assured of their opposition’ (Ibid.: 13–14).

In contrast to the idea that, in such cases, it is power (augmented control

over one’s own circumstances) that is primarily the issue, Smith thought
that on many occasions when we rejoice in mutual sympathy, and despair
in its absence, ‘both the pleasure and the pain’ are ‘felt so instantaneously

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and on such frivolous occasions’ that ‘neither of them can be derived from
any such self-interested consideration’. Smith conceded that in some cases,
and to some extent, we may by sympathizing enliven our own pleasurable
emotional reactions, as ‘when we have read a book or poem so often that
we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can
still take pleasure in reading it to a companion’. But, he said, even this
cannot be the whole story: ‘The sympathy, which my friends express with
my joy, might, indeed, give me pleasure by enlivening that joy: but that
which they express with my grief could give me none, if it served only to
enliven that grief’ (Ibid.: 14).

So, it is not just that our emotional states are enlivened by those of

others. It is also that the mere correspondence between their states and
ours can move us, and sometimes move us profoundly, by reliving our
otherwise terrible sense of emotional isolation, of being trapped in our
own interior drama in a way that excludes others:

Sympathy, however, enlivens joy and alleviates grief. It enlivens
joy by presenting another source of satisfaction; and it alleviates
grief by insinuating into the heart almost the only agreeable
sensation which it is at that time capable of receiving. It is to
be observed accordingly, that we are still more anxious to
communicate to our friends our disagreeable than our agreeable
passions, that we derive still more satisfaction from their
sympathy with the former than from that with the latter, and
that we are still more shocked by the want of it.

(Ibid.: 14–15)

When we are already connected, we do not need to be reconnected or to
have our connection augmented through sympathy: ‘The agreeable passions
of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any auxiliary
pleasure’. But ‘the bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment
more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy’ (Ibid.: 15).

It is a question, it seems, of overcoming self-enclosure, and connecting

to others. In Smith’s view, such connecting is sufficiently valuable and
pleasurable to us that we will sympathize with another’s distress, and hence
to some extent experience their distress ourselves, in order to connect:

As the person who is principally interested in any event is
pleased with our sympathy, and hurt by the want of it, so we,
too, seem to be pleased when we are able to sympathize with
him, and to be hurt when we are unable to do so. We run not
only to congratulate the successful, but to condole with the
afflicted; and the pleasure which we find in the conversation of
one whom in all the passions of his heart we can entirely

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sympathize with, seems to do more than compensate the
painfulness of that sorrow with which the view of his situation
affects us.

(Ibid.: 15–16)

Thus, ‘it is always disagreeable to feel that we cannot sympathize with
him, and instead of being pleased with this exemption from sympathetic
pain, it hurts us to find that we cannot share his uneasiness’ (Ibid.: 16).
Thereby, Smith explained what, from Hume’s view, emerged as a puzzle.
If Hume’s account had been the whole truth, we would have had a powerful
motive not to sympathize with the negative emotions of others, since in
doing so we set in motion a process that converts their distress into our
distress. Smith, in contrast, recognized the value of negative emotions and
offered an explanation of their function.

Smith also was concerned to relate the sympathizer’s internal life with

their external behavior. For instance, our response to our inability to
sympathize even with another’s unpleasant emotion may encourage us to
abuse them: ‘If we hear a person loudly lamenting his misfortunes, which,
however, upon bringing the case home to ourselves, we feel, can produce
no such violent effect upon us, we are shocked at his grief; and, because
we cannot enter into it, call it pusillanimity and weakness. It gives us the
spleen, on the other hand, to see another too happy or too much elevated,
as we call it, with any little piece of good fortune’ (Ibid.). In other words,
we want not so much to be ‘in synch’ with others, as for them to be in
‘synch with us’. And we want this, not so much to increase our power or
even to heighten the emotion which we may have in common with those
with whom we sympathize, but simply because it feels good.

All such thoughts both concern personal identity in a larger sense and

also illustrate how Smith, the psychologist, confined himself to what Hume
had earlier characterized as ‘the frontiers’ of human nature. In Smith’s
moral psychology, there is no ‘march up directly to the capital or centre’
of human nature, at least not to the place where Hume located that center.
Even when it came to personal identity per se, indeed even when Smith
teetered on the brink of discussing fission examples, he avoided talk of
substance (and of what links successive stages of a person) in favor of
discussing the phenomenon of dissociation, the first since Locke to consider
it seriously.

Smith’s interest in dissociation, which seemingly was quite independent

of Locke’s interest in it, was in its relation to conscience. In that context,
Smith, like Locke, addressed fission-like examples. Smith said, ‘When I
endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence
upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such
cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner
and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person

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whose conduct is examined into and judged of’ (Ibid.: 113)

We know

there are two personas, or persons, Smith continued, because they have
different roles: The first is the judge; the second the person judged of. But
that the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person judged
of, is as impossible, as that the cause should, in every respect, be the same
with the effect (Ibid.: 135).

Smith had different names for this judge, which he repeated often and

interchangeably, always talking of the judge as if he were a stern father:
‘the man within the breast’, ‘the great inmate’, ‘the awful and respectable
judge’, ‘the impartial spectator’. In Smith’s view, people are virtuous to
whatever degree they identify with this disinterested persona. Thus, he
says that ‘the man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man
who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command’ does
‘not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts
them. He almost identifies himself with, he almost becomes himself that
impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his
conduct directs him to feel’ (Ibid.: 146–7). One gets the impression that it
was not easy to be Adam Smith.

That is as far as Smith took his discussion of dissociation. In Locke’s

thought about dissociated personalities, amnesiac barriers mark the
boundaries among personas (which, for Locke, are separate persons). Smith
never discussed the issue of amnesiac barriers. In fact, he rarely even
mentioned memory, one of the most telling signs that the sorts of worries
about personal identity that animated Locke and his critics did not interest
Smith. Rather, Smith lets identifications with interested and disinterested
points of view mark the salient boundaries among personas, which, for
him, probably were not literally separate persons. And in thinking about
such issues, as we saw earlier in the case of Leibniz, Smith hit upon an
aspect of fission-like examples which, while not salient to eighteenth-
century theorists, would resonate later, in the nineteenth century, with
thinkers whose interests in dissociation transcended the limited confines
of the traditional personal identity debate. And it would resonate later still,
in our own times, with thinkers investigating the child’s acquisition of a
theory of mind.

Edmund Law

As we have seen, Locke’s views on personal identity were immediately
attacked by philosophers and theologians, especially by those who wished
to defend the immortality of the soul. Clarke, Berkeley, Watts and Butler
were among his leading critics. But there were others, such as Collins,
Hume, and Priestley, who would try to develop something like a Lockean
account into a new naturalism of self and identity. There were also a few
who intended merely to defend what they took to be Locke’s view, without

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putting forth a new view of their own. Among these were Catharine Trotter
(Cockburn), Vincent Peronnet, and Edmund Law. Of these, Law was the most
original.

The situations that these defenders of Locke had to face were quite different.

Trotter’s early defense of Locke, in 1702, was in opposition to Thomas Burnet’s
determined attempt to ignore, first, that Locke distinguished man from person
and, second, that Locke did not deny the existence of an immaterial soul so
much as he tried to provide an account of personal identity that was
independent of it. Trotter perceptively defended Locke on both of these points.
She also argued—again in her later publication of 1726— that Locke’s account
of personal identity successfully resolved difficulties about the resurrection.

Vincent Perronet wrote two defenses of Locke’s account of personal identity.

In the second, which was published in 1738, he replied to the criticisms of
Butler and Watts (Perronet 1738). Perronet there insisted that the question of
personal identity hinges on the proper forensic definition of person and
reiterated what he took to be the importance of Locke’s distinction between
human and person: ‘I think it must appear sufficiently plain, that by Person,
Mr. Locke does not mean either a Man, or any other living Agent, in general;
but only such a Rational Being, as is actually conscious of its own Behaviour;
capable of a Law, and answerable for its Actions. So that One in a Phrensy,
not withstanding him being a Man or living Agent, would not however,
according to Mr. Locke, be esteem’d a Person’. Perronet then asked:

Is the Mad Man justly punishable for what the Sober Man did? If
he be not, then we must allow that something more is necessary to
constitute the same Person, in Mr. Locke’s Sense, than bearly being
the same Man. He that has lost his Understanding, and the Remem-
brance of his Crimes, is yet the same living Agent, and may, I
presume, be call’d the same Guilty Man: But if he be not the same
Conscious Being, or the same proper Object of Punishment, he is
not in Mr. Locke’s phrase, the same Person. And indeed his
Opinion, that God Almighty will punish no Man hereafter for any
Crime, but what is first brought home to his Mind and Conscience,
seems to have plain Reason, if not plain Revelation, on its Side.

(Ibid.: 7–10)

But Perronet did not deal with two issues: whether Locke’s notion of person
picked out a substance; and whether Locke’s account could avoid the kind of
contradiction based on memory that Berkeley, in Alchiphron (1732), had
recently proposed (see pp. 65–6).

Law was the next defender of Locke. In 1731, he had translated William

King’s, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, to which he added voluminous
notes, often presenting Locke’s views on various matters, and also added
John Gay’s, ‘A Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental

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Principle of Virtue or Morality’, which was the first attempt to explicate
the source of morality not on any supposed innate ‘moral sense’ but on
‘observation and imitation of others’ and on laws of association. Gay’s
essay was to have a great influence on Hartley’s association psychology
(King 1731:xxxiii). In 1769, Law published, A defence of Mr. Locke’s
opinions concerning Personal Identity. Although Law’s piece was sparked
by an anonymous essay on personal identity published that year, he said
little about the objectionable essay and turned quickly to defending his
version of Locke’s view.

It is a mark of how much the philosophical climate, in 1769, had changed

since Perronet, thirty years earlier, had published his defense of Locke that
Law could defend Locke as he did and not pay a heavy personal price. Just
a year after Perronet’s defense, Book I of Hume’s Treatise had been
published. Although Hume’s early impact was mostly indirect, by midcentury
there were far fewer defenders of the notion that personal identity was based
on a simple, immaterial, immortal soul. Law, himself, in a work on religion
in which he had discussed the idea of the ‘sleep of the soul’, had argued that
Scripture did not support the notion that between death and resurrection the
soul separates from the body (Law 1759). If Law had published either his
defense of this idea or his defense of Locke much earlier in the century, he
would have been viciously attacked. By mid-century, he could make such
assertions and not even lose his position at Cambridge. Indeed, not long
afterwards, despite much debate over his views, Law was appointed Bishop
of Carlisle, a major position in the Church. Times had changed.

The changes were no doubt due in part to continuing philosophical debate,

such as had occurred between Clarke and Collins, over whether human
thinking must have an immaterial substantial base. Locke had proposed the
possibility of ‘thinking matter’, which at first had sounded the alarms of
heresy. By mid-century the simple immaterial substance view was much
less certain, and alternatives to it much more palatable. As a result, Law
could supplement his review of Christian sources by remarking ‘that all
philosophical arguments drawn from our notions of matter, and urged against
the possibility of life, thought, and agency being so connected with some
portions of it as to constitute a compound Being…or person, are merely
grounded on our ignorance’. Law conceded that there were difficulties about
the relations of mind and body, but argued that the word substance would
not help to solve any of them. ‘He that carefully attends to the workings of
nature’, Law said, ‘and sees how oft the several classes of beings run into
each other, will not find very much weight in arguments grounded upon
ontological distinctions only’. And were such arguments to establish an
‘essential difference’ between mind and body, they could show at most that
mind ‘might possibly be conceived to subsist apart from’ body, that is, to
‘be sustained in a new manner, and with new perfections by the Deity; but
whether he will actually so sustain it, can, I apprehend, be known only from

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his word; which represents the thing, we see, in quite another light: nor indeed
ever seems to countenance this nice speculation, by treating man in any such
intricate, abstracted way’ (Law 1759:414–16).

In his 1769 defense of Locke on personal identity, Law responded to the worry

that person, on Locke’s account, might not pick out a substance, but only a mode,
by agreeing that person picked out only a mode. Then, relying heavily on Locke’s
remarks on the use of substance terms in ethics, Law argued, in effect, that the
word person also picked out what deserved to be regarded as a virtual substance:

Now the word person, as is well observed by Mr. Locke…is properly
a forensic term, and here to be used in the strict forensic sense, denoting
some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral
agent, or an accountable creature; renders him the proper subject of
laws, and a true object of rewards and punishments. When we apply it
to any man, we do not treat him absolutely, and in gross; but under a
particular relation or precision: we do not comprehend or concern
ourselves about the several inherent properties which accompany him
in real existence, which go to the making up the whole complex notion
of an active and intelligent being; but arbitrarily abstract one single
quality or mode from the rest.

(Law 1769:145–6)

Thus, in Law’s interpretation of Locke, a person is human, but denuded of all
human properties except those that are relevant to forensic issues.

In agreement with Locke’s view that general moral truths, like the truths of

geometry, are eternal and hypothetical, Law claimed that the particulars of which
they are true are not concrete but ‘abstract’. Geometry is about particular, concrete
objects, he said, but about them only in so far as they have certain characteristics
and not others. For instance, it is about particular spherical objects, but only so far
as they are spherical. This restriction of focus licenses talk of a merely geometrical
sphere, which functions as a kind of surrogate—if you like, virtual—substance.
In Law’s view (and also in his interpretation of Locke’s view), it is this sort of
restriction of focus that makes the subject matter of geometry abstract. It is also
what makes persons abstract.

The forensic issues that interested Law had to do mainly with account-ability.

Forensics, in his view, is about persons, but only in so far as they have certain
characteristics and not others. For Law, the characteristic that mattered most about
humans is consciousness. Thus, persons are humans, but only in so far as they are
conscious. As a consequence, he reasoned, persons, in reality, are modes of humans,
but modes which it is convenient to talk about as if they were substances. So
much for persons. What about their identities?

In Law’s version of Locke’s view, one person is identical with another just if

he is accountable for the other’s behavior. What makes a person accountable is
‘nothing more, than his becoming sensible at different times of what he had thought

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or done before: and being as fully convinced that he then thought or did it,
as he now is of his present thoughts, acts, and existence’ (Ibid.: 147). Law
argued that personal identity, in this sense, is a social distinction, ‘a creature
of Society, an abstract consideration of man, necessary for the mutual benefit
of him and his fellows’, that is, ‘a mere forensic term’. Law said that to
inquire after ‘the criterion or constituent’ of personal identity is to inquire
in what circumstances societies ‘have in fact agreed to inflict evil upon
individuals, in order to prevent evils to the whole body from any irregular
member’ (Ibid.: 180).

Law earlier gave an example of just how far, in his view, the moral and

forensic distinction between man and person reaches, or should reach, in
criminal justice, and how it depends on consciousness:

And whence then does this difference in any one’s moral capacity
arise, but from that plain diversity in his natural one? from his
absolute irretrievable want of consciousness in one case, and not
in the other? Suppose now that one in the former state kills a
man; that he, or some part of what we call him, was ever so
notoriously the instrument, or occasion of that death; yet if he
was either then insensible of the fact, or afterwards became so,
and so continued: Would he be any more guilty of murder, than if
that death had been occasioned by another person? since at that
time he was truly such, or at least is so now, notwithstanding
that most people might be apt to judge him still the same, from a
sameness in outward circumstances…from his shape, mien, or
appearance.

(Ibid.: 151, emphasis added)

Thus, according to Law’s account of Locke’s theory, in order for someone
now to be the same person as someone who performed an act previously, the
person now must either actually recollect or be capable of being induced to
recollect having performed that act, with the same consciousness he had at
the time. Such a capacity can come and go. Hence, Law viewed personal
identity as an abstract mode of a substance rather than as a substance itself.

Nevertheless, it is not just human societies that rely on consciousness as

the criterion of personhood and accountability:

This distinct consciousness of our past actions, from whence arise
all the ideas of merit and demerit, will most undoubtedly be
regarded with due weight in foro divino; and indeed has its due
weight in foro humano, whenever it can be with certainty
determined: wherever this appears wanting, all judicial
proceedings are at an end. How so plain soever any criminal act
were, the man would now-a-days be acquitted from guilt in the

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commission of it, and discharged from the penalties annexed to such
fact, could it at the same time be as plainly made out, that he was
incapable of knowing what he did, or is now under a like incapacity
of recollecting it.

(Ibid.: 147)

God and Locke have the same view of personhood.

Law recognized that this account stresses certain features of Locke’s view at

the expense of others. He said that Locke defined person in a ‘popular sense’
when he defined it as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection,
and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking being, in different times and
places’. But, Law continued, ‘when the term is used more accurately and
philosophically, it stands for one especial property of that thing or being, separated
from all the rest that do or may attend it in real existence’. The crucial property is
‘rationality’, not all of it, but ‘so far only, as it makes a human ‘capable of knowing
what he does and suffers, and on what account, and therefore renders him amenable
to justice for his behaviour’ (Ibid.: 155–6). In the Appendix to his essay, Law
suggested that Locke had ‘incautiously defined the word’ person and that ‘the
expression would have been more just, had he said that the word stands for an
attribute, or quality, or character of a thinking intelligent being’ (Ibid.: 166–7).

Law further suggested that person is better defined in the Ciceronian sense of

mode or mask, and that when a person is so defined:

as an intelligent being subject to government and laws, and accountable
for his actions…all difficulties that relate to a man’s forgetting some
actions, &ct. now vanish…and it amounts to no more than saying
that a man puts on a mask—continuing to wear it for some time—
puts off one mask and takes another, i.e. appears to have
consciousness—to recollect past consciousnesses—does not recollect,
&ct.

(Ibid.: 167)

By taking this virtual-substance approach to personal identity, Law believed that
such paradoxes of memory as the one proposed by Berkeley (which he briefly
mentioned) can be ignored. For Law, such paradoxes have no practical import.
‘To dwell upon those surprising consequences that might attend the transfering
the same consciousness to different beings [a reference to fission?], or giving the
same being very different ones, is merely puzzling and perplexing the point, by
introducing such conclusions as never really existed, and would not alter the true
state of the question if they did’ (Ibid.: 197). By thus pushing forensic concerns
to their limit, Law was able to make a move not available to Locke himself. He
was able to displace the traditional concept of the self or person as a pure, simple
immaterial substance, or as a vital union of an immaterial soul with a material
body, with a view of persons as abstract modes or attributes of a substance. In

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doing so he was able to make Locke’s view more consistent with itself, but only
by forfeiting the notion that a person is some kind of substance.

That Law, the Bishop of Carlisle, could exhibit a confidence in this conclusion,

which is Lockean in spirit, but which Locke, himself, would hardly have dared to
utter, is indicated in the following concluding passage:

Well then, having examined a little into the nature, and enumerated
some few properties of an abstract idea in general, and shown that
this particular one before us can be nothing more, we may find perhaps
that however fluctuating and changeful this account may be judged
to render personality; how much soever it may fall short of some
sublime systems about purely immaterial substances, and perfectly
independent principles of thought; yet there is no help for these
changes in the seat of personality; since, in the last place, we know of
nothing more stable and permanent in our constitution that has the
least pretence to settle and support it. All parts of the body are to a
certain degree in perpetual flux, nor is any one of them, that we are
acquainted with, concerned in the present case more than another. As
to the mind, both its cogitative and active powers are suspended
(whether they be so or not is a matter of fact, in which experience
only, and not subtile argumentations drawn from the nature of an
unknown, perhaps imaginary, essence ought to decide) during sound
sleep: Nay, every drowsy nod (as Mr. Locke expresses it) must shake
their doctrine, who maintain that these powers are incessantly
employed.

Law continued:

To the difficulties so often objected, of this being a ‘new creation’,
and making the same thing have ‘two beginnings of existence’; —We
may observe, that it would indeed be an absurdity to suppose two
beginnings of existence, if the identity of a substance, being, or man
were inquired into; but when the inquiry is made into the artificial
abstract idea of personality, invented for a particular end, to answer
which consciousness only is required, beginning and end of existence
are quite out of the question, being foreign to any consideration of
the subject.

(Ibid.: 159–62)

Law’s views on the ‘sleep of the soul’ would importantly affect Priestley.
But Law’s radical view of persons as abstract particulars would not be
further developed during the eighteenth century.

110

THE SELF AS MIND

Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, soul theorists were still anxious
to defend the immaterial substantiality of the soul against those who would
account for self and personal identity along relational lines. They had not yet
felt the winds of history blowing against them. As the century wore on, the
winds eventually became a gale. Soul theorists could not help but notice. One
effect of their noticing had to do with their willingness to defend the view that
the soul is immaterial. Clarke’s bravado contrasts nicely with the defensiveness
of Berkeley and Butler, and, with the subsequent reluctance of soul theorists,
after Hume, even to do battle on the issue. Another effect is that for soul
theorists, toward the beginning of the century, it was enough simply to defend
the immateriality of the soul and related a priori doctrines, such as the reflexivity
of consciousness, without also contributing to the emerging science of human
nature. Again, Clarke is the premier example. Later in the century, many soul
theorists bracketed their commitment to the immateriality of the soul in order
to conduct meaningful empirical research.

Berkeley is a case in point. While the immateriality of soul is crucial to his

metaphysics, it is almost irrelevant to his inquires into vision. Similarly, in
Butler’s case, while the immateriality of the soul is central to his defense, in
the Analogy, of immortality, it is almost irrelevant to his more empirically
motivated concerns in the Sermons. Later still, while many important theorists,
such as Hartley, Tucker, and Reid remained committed to the existence of an
immaterial soul, there was little swagger in their attempt to defend this
commitment, if, indeed, they attempted to defend it at all. In their contributing
to the newly emerging science of mind, they managed for the most part to put
their commitment to the soul outside of the focus of their inquiries and also
safely out of the line of fire. In sum, soul theorists, at least the ones that we
now think mattered, tended to change their approach from the beginning to the
middle of the eighteenth century. Not only did they begin to embrace the
empirical study of human nature, but they found ways in their empirical
theorizing to marginalize their view that the soul is immaterial.

A symptom of these changes is that in the last half of the century there

emerged a pattern of theoretical allegiances of a kind that would have been

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unimaginable in the first half. Increasingly, in debates between theorists, it did
not matter what one’s view was of the immaterial soul. Thus, Hartley, the dualist,
was an ally of Priestley, the materialist, while Reid, the dualist, attacked both.
And while the main influences on Tucker, the dualist, were Locke, Clarke, and
Hartley, it was not Locke and Hartley’s dualism that mattered to Tucker, but
their more scientific pursuits. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that
Priestley could have put forth the very same views he did, even if, like Hartley,
he had been a dualist; and Reid could have put forth most of his views, even if
he had been a materialist. The philosophy of human nature had largely
disengaged from both religion and philosophy. In the process, it had become
the science of mind.

As a consequence of this disengagement, a new sort of methodological

dispute arose that had to do more with technique than with metaphysics. Earlier
in the century, Hume had criticized those of his contemporaries who were
following ‘the tedious lingering method’. But his recommended alternative
was to append a foundational epistemology and metaphysics to the fledgling
science of human nature. In the last third of the century, as we shall see,
methodological disputes began to arise that were more internal to the new
science. At issue in these new disputes was not whether to enlarge the domain
of the new science by incorporating metaphysics, but of how best to generate
and test empirical hypotheses. As we have just seen, by the latter third of the
century most of those who were at the center of the new research programs had
already figured out how to marginalize their background religious and
metaphysical commitments. With the field of battle thus cleared of intruders,
the way was open to fine tune more internal aspects of strategy and tactics.

David Hartley

Hartley, the son of a minister and himself trained to be a minister, could not
accept the notion of eternal punishment and, so, decided instead to become a
physician. Perhaps as a result of this mixed training, his thought is both exact
and speculative, and his speculations both naturalistic and theological.

His

main work, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations
(1749) is part physiology (vibrations in the brain), part psychology (association
of ideas), and part Christian theology. It combines a necessitarian metaphysics,
mechanistic associationist psychology, and a vision of moral and religious
development which has as its end ‘perfect Self-annihilation and the pure Love
of God’ (Hartley 1749:v.2, 282).

Although Priestley greatly admired Hartley, in his 1775 edition of Hartley’s

work, he decided that only the part dealing with laws of association merited
republication because the theory of vibrations was mere speculation and the
religious ideas irrelevant. Yet Hartley’s thoughts on physiology theoretically
grounded his associational psychology, and he often illustrated his psychology
with examples that led directly to his theology. In addition, although the

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particular form of his physiological hypothesis quickly became outdated, his
suggestion that there is an intimate and dependent relationship between mental
and physical events in the brain and his speculations about what that relationship
is greatly advanced materialist trends in psychology, including Priestley’s own
materialism.

However, Hartley was a methodological materialist, not also a substantive

(metaphysical) one. In this respect, he differed from Collins before him and
Priestley after. Hartley believed that ‘man consists of two parts, body and mind’,
where the mind ‘is that substance, agent, principle, &c. to which we refer the
sensation, ideas, pleasures, pains, and voluntary motions’. However, he accepted
Locke’s concession that it is possible, for all we know, that matter thinks:

Matter, if it could be endued with the most simple Kinds of
Sensation, might also arrive at all that Intelligence of which the
human Mind is possessed: Whence this Theory must be allowed to
overturn all the Arguments which are usually brought for the
Immateriality of the Soul from the Subtlety of the internal Senses,
and of the rational Faculty. But I no-ways presume to determine
whether Matter can be endued with Sensation or no.

(Ibid.:v.1, 511–12)

Hartley doubted that either problems with materialism or prescientific intuitions
we may have about unity of consciousness could be used to prove that the soul
is immaterial. He said that ‘it is difficult to know [even] what is meant by the
Unity of Consciousness’, adding that the main problem with materialism is
‘that Matter and Motion, however subtly divided, or reasoned upon, yield
nothing more than Matter and Motion still’. But it was, he said, ‘foreign to
[his] Purpose’ to pursue the issue.

Hartley’s humility about ontological questions extended to issues involving

the afterlife. It is worth noting, he said, ‘that the Immateriality of the Soul has
little or no Connexion with its Immortality; and that we ought to depend upon
Him who first breathed into Man the Breath of the present Life, for our
Resurrection to a better’ (Ibid.: 512). Thus, although Hartley had metaphysical
and theological views, which he expressed side by side with his more scientific
ones, he never used the former to determine the content of the latter. He was a
physico-theologian, as Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Newton had been before him,
but in his scientific work it was the physico side that prevailed. In his case, like
Locke’s, his epistemological views engendered a deep humility, mixed with
true religious piety, about the extent to which, through reason, humans can
know metaphysical and religious truths.

In stark contrast to his metaphysical and theological humility, Hartley’s

associationist psychology is boldly speculative. There he claimed that all human
nature is built out of associations of sensations and consequent ideas, whose
origins are in physical impressions in the organism. Previously, in 1700, in the

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fourth edition of the Essay, Locke had introduced the notion of association of
ideas, but had presented associations as obstacles to rational thought. He did not
see the power that the concept of association might have as a fundamental and
extremely general productive principle of the mind. Hume did see this, and,
independently of Hume, so did Hartley. However, Hartley differed from Hume
in using the principle in conjunction with his physiological hypothesis to provide
a general account of human nature, beginning with sensations, and including not
only memory and imagination, but reasoning, the emergence out of pleasure and
pain of the various passions (e.g., ambition, self-interest, and sympathy), and
the development of involuntary and voluntary action. For Hume, association
was a principle in the service of philosophy; for Hartley, it was a principle in the
service of the first truly general account of human and animal psychology, which,
as it happened, laid an important part of the groundwork for the more scientific,
association psychology that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

Hartley thought that his association theory was empirically testable. He used

it as a springboard for what he took to be experientially grounded speculations
about the way mental systems work and complex behaviors develop. For instance,
in the case of compassion (‘affections by which we grieve for the misery of
others’) in children, he said:

When their Parents, Attendants, &c. are sick or afflicted, it is usual
to raise in their Minds the nascent Ideas of Pains and Miseries, by
such Words and Signs as are suited to their Capacities; they also find
themselves laid under many Restraints on this Account. —And these
and such-like Circumstances have raised the Desires and Endeavours
to remove the Causes of these their own internal uneasy Feelings, or,
which is the same thing, of these Miseries of others (in all which
they are much influenced, as in other like Cases, by the great
Disposition to imitate, before spoken of); and a Variety of internal
Feelings and Desires of this Kind are so blended and associated
together, as that no Part can be distinguished separately from the
rest; the Child may properly be said to have Compassion.

(Ibid.: 475)

Thus, in Hartley’s view, it is primarily a child’s own discomfort and its association
with the discomfort of others that leads to the child’s compassion; for in relieving
the pain of others, a child’s own ‘associated’ pain would also be relieved.

Hartley proposed that associations operate on bodily activities even when the

mind is only partly involved. For instance, he proposed that ‘voluntary and semi-
voluntary Motions are deducible from Association’:

After the actions, which are most perfectly voluntary, have been
rendered so by one set of associations, they may, by another, be

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made to depend upon the most diminutive sensations, ideas, and
motions, such as the mind scarce regards, or is conscious of; and
which therefore it can scarce recollect the moment after the action
is over. Hence it follows, that association not only converts
automatic actions into voluntary, but voluntary ones into automatic.

(Ibid.: 104)

Through such remarks, Hartley laid the foundation for a mechanistic
physiological psychology which, in the long run, presupposed that an overly
strict distinction between the powers of mind and body could only inhibit fruitful
theoretical development.

Hartley’s holism about the mind and its physiological underpinning included

an extended discussion of maladies of the mind and their effects on reasoning.
The maladies are understood as vibrations gone awry, in a reciprocal causal
relationship with one’s sense of self: ‘The same Increase of Vibrations makes
all the principal Ideas appear to affect Self, with the peculiar interesting Concern
supposed to flow from personal Identity; so that these Vibrations exert a reflected
Influence upon themselves by this means’ (Ibid.: 398–9). In discussing madness,
Hartley says that if someone ‘whose nervous System is disordered’ were ‘to
turn his Thoughts accidentally to some barely possible Good or Evil’, the
‘nervous Disorder’ might increase ‘the Vibrations belonging to its Idea so much,
as to give it a Reality, a Connexion with Self’ (Ibid.: 401).

In discussing how the idea of God emerges in children, Hartley suggested

that ‘children in their first Attempts to decypher the Word God, will suppose it
to stand for a Man, whom they have never seen, and of whom consequently
they form a compound fictitious Idea, consisting of Parts before generated by
Men, whom they have seen’. Then, when children later ‘hear that God cannot
be seen, having no visible Shape, no Parts: but that he is a spiritual infinite
Being; this adds much to their Perplexity and Astonishment, and by degrees
destroys the Association of the fictitious visible Idea before mentioned with
the Word God’. Combining these and other observations and hypotheses, he
concluded that ‘amongst Jews and Christians, Children begin probably with a
definite visible Idea of God; but that by degrees this is quite obliterated, without
any thing of a stable and precise Nature succeeding in its room; and that, by
farther Degrees, a great Variety of strong secondary Ideas, i.e. mental Affections
(attended indeed by visible Ideas, to which proper Words are affixed, as of
Angels, the general Judgment, &c.), recur in their Turns, when they think upon
God’ (Ibid.: 486–8).

Turning next to the ‘Love of God’, Hartley speculated that in the first instance

it is ‘evidently deduced’ either directly or indirectly ‘from [self-] interested
Motives’, such as ‘the Hopes of a future Reward’ but that subsequently, ‘after
all the several Sources of the Love of God have coalesced together, this Affection
becomes as disinterested as any other; as the Pleasure we take in any natural or
artificial Beauty, in the Esteem of others, or even in sensual Gratifications’

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(Ibid.: 490). In Hartley’s view, all interest has its foundation in sensation. In
some, disinterested love eventually takes over and culminates in the dominating
disinterested love of God. In his view, by means of a mechanical process, which
is properly studied in empirical psychology, it can be determined that the human
mind undergoes a developmental sequence from sensual self-interest to a
felicitous love of God, and to the anticipation of an afterlife, in which this
felicity continues.

Abraham Tucker

Tucker is now known primarily for his contributions to associationist
psychology and to ethical theory. As an early utilitarian, he influenced Hazlitt
and William Paley, the latter of whom said in his preface to his Principles of
Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), that he had found in Tucker ‘more
original thinking and observation upon the several subjects that he has taken in
hand than in any other, not to say than in all others put together’ (Brown
1970:95). Since Paley’s book for many years was widely used as a text at
Cambridge and elsewhere, Tucker’s reputation remained alive into the next
generation.

Tucker’s main scientific contributions were in the fields of action-theory

and associationistic psychology. He gave a more refined analysis of what is
involved in human action than had previous thinkers and, while agreeing with
Locke that compatibilism is the proper account of free will, he criticized Locke’s
view that desire is always prompted by uneasiness. So far as mental mechanics
is concerned, Tucker argued that the fusion of elementary ideas into complex
ones could not be understood on the basis of the association of ideas.

For present purposes, Tucker is chiefly interesting as a fascinating example

of a thinker who was torn between two traditions. Because he could not accept
the crude attempts of Hartley and other materialists of his day to account for
the phenomena of consciousness, he was driven to embrace the views of Clarke,
who he revered. One could almost say that what Collins had been to Locke’s
views, Tucker was to Clarke’s. But Tucker was too committed to an empirical
methodology to accept Clarke’s theories for a priori reasons. And in his attempt
to justify Clarke’s views empirically, he emptied them of virtually all of their
metaphysical content.

In his contributions to action theory, Tucker occasionally touched on

questions about self and personal identity similar to some of the questions that
we have been tracking. For instance, in response to the question of when it is
appropriate to say of an action that it is one’s own, he proposed that the answer
has to do with the action’s having being caused by one’s own motives without
the intervention of anyone else’s voluntary activity; and as Harry Frankfurt
and others have been in our own times, Tucker was convinced of the relevance
of second-order desires to the question of free will (Ibid.: 105, 135)

However,

it is not Tucker’s action theory but some of his more fanciful speculations,

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derived from his reflections on unity of consciousness, that best illustrate the
facet of his thought that is of most interest to us.

Early in 1763, Tucker published, Free-Will, Foreknowledge, and Fate

(1763a). It was criticized in a periodical for being ‘greatly deficient in
physiological knowledge’ of the basis of human individuality, and for assuming
an unwarranted immaterialism. Later in the same year, he published Man in
Quest of Himself: Or a Defence of the Individuality of the Human Mind, or
Self (1763b), in which he responded to this criticism by trying to explain why
there can be no satisfactory materialist account of personal unity. His main
argument for this, which drew heavily on Clarke’s arguments (he even cited
Clarke on the title page), was based on the simplicity of self or mind and the
divisibility of matter. Yet Tucker did not, as Clarke had done in his debate with
Collins, dismiss materialism from an external perspective as ‘an impossible
hypothesis’. Instead, in the foregoing two books and his later The Light of
Nature Pursued (1768–77), he developed a four-stage strategy for dealing with
materialism. First, he assumed that morality is justified. Then, he argued for a
theologically based utilitarianism, according to which morality would not be
justified if there were no afterlife with divine rewards and punishments. Then,
he argued that there could be no afterlife unless the soul is immaterial and,
hence, naturally immortal. Finally, he tried to show that on the basis of
materialism one cannot account for unity of consciousness. It is the latter two
arguments only that concern us.

Tucker’s main arguments for the immateriality and natural immortality of the

soul appeared in a footnote in Free-will (1763a) and were subsequently repeated
at greater length in Man in Quest of Himself (1763b) and The Light of Nature
Pursued (1768–77). In the footnote, he claimed that ‘Perception cannot be made
up of no perceptions; nor received by a number of atoms jointly, unless received
by each of them singly’ no more than ‘whispers heard by a thousand men’ can
‘make together a [resounding] audible voice’. He also argued—on the basis of
Clarke’s nominalistic thesis that ‘existence belongs only to individuals’ since
compound things are merely collections of substances and, as such, have no
existence apart from that of their parts—that just as ‘if the King were to incorporate
six hundred men into a regiment, there would not be six hundred and one Beings
therefore, one for the regiment, and one for each of the men’, so ‘neither when a
multiple of atoms run together to form a human body, is there a Being more than
there was before: nor would there be a Being lost out of nature upon its dissolution’
(Tucker 1763a:190–1). While an atomist might conclude from this that
ontologically a human being or person must be merely fictional, like the regiment,
Tucker, instead, argued that people are exceptions since ‘no man can doubt of
his own existence, or that he has a personality belonging to him distinct from all
other Beings’. He reasoned that since ‘I can never cease to be myself, nor become
another person’ I must exist as something over and above the parts out of which
I am composed: ‘There is one being the more in nature for my existence; and
were I annihilated there would be a Being the less’.

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Using the simplicity argument of his predecessors, Tucker then argued for ‘the

individuality of mind, or spirit of man, and consequently its perpetual duration: for
nature can only destroy compounds by dissolving their parts, but individuals cannot
be destroyed without a miracle, that is, an immediate exertion of Omnipotence’ (Ibid.:
191). In sum, since all natural bodies are composed of atoms, then all of them—
except humans—are analogous to the King’s regiment in that they are merely
compositions of atoms, not new substances or beings in addition to the atoms of
which they are composed. But we are certain of our own existence as real individuals,
with our own unique personalities. So, we cannot be merely composed of atoms.

There is no indication in any of Tucker’s works that he had read Hume’s Treatise.

So, he may not have been exposed to Hume’s argument that we have no introspective
access to ourselves as simple beings, nor to Hume’s conten-tion that we are as
‘artificial’ in our mental or personal unity as our bodies are in their material unity.
Understandably, the reviewer of Tucker’s book on free will suggested that if a
Regiment is an artificial Being, then so is a human Being. Tucker, thus, was forced
to argue further for his presumed unity and individuality of the self. He began to
do this in Man in Quest of Himself (1763b) by suggesting that we have ‘the strongest
idea of substance’ from our own Being. He then argued that ‘what is properly You
and your Existence’ cannot depend on the individual material atoms of which
your body is composed since these may be lost even though you persist. Nor can it
depend on the continued existence of your perceptual organs or the nerves of the
brain since (he assumed) you also persist whether or not these are available for
use. Finally, he argued that if materialism were true, the self would have to be
composed of a ‘fifth element’, to be placed at a location in the brain where it can
‘receive notices’ from the organs of perception and then control the organism’s
activities.

As we saw in Chapter 2, Tucker used examples of both fission and fusion to argue

that this ‘fifth element’ could be divided and reappear in other brains at other times.
He said, for instance, that two persons could contribute to form one new person, who
would never experience himself as either of these contributing persons. Quite apart
from such exotic possibilities, Tucker claimed that it is likely that in the normal
course of events the particles of which any such fifth element is composed would
change constantly throughout an individual’s life, compatibly with the individual
person’s persisting. He concluded:

Then if You are a real Being and substance, and are not barely a form or
mode of existence in something else, and if your Existence and
Personality remains the same throughout all the stages of life, from
infancy to extreme old age, notwithstanding all the changes of particles
in your drop; may we not argue, as we did before, concerning the nerves
and the organs, that they are no parts of You, but channels to convey
perception to something else, which is numerically and substantially
Yourself?

(Tucker 1763b:206)

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Tucker assumed that the materialist has no answer to this question. He, thus,
concluded that the individual is a simple indivisible, immaterial substance.

Tucker then asserted that ‘into whatever composition this Individual enters,

we esteem it Ourselves for the time, notwithstanding fluctuation of its parts;
provided they fall into the same connection, and serve the same uses their
predecessors did before’ (Ibid.). The conclusion that Tucker reached is, in many
respects, hardly different from that of Descartes, that the mind is an indivisible,
immaterial substance, attached to a body and controlling it from a central
location in the brain. However, Tucker went on to argue that while an individual
spiritual substance is necessary for perception and action, it is not sufficient.
In his view, without a body of some sort, an immaterial spirit can neither
perceive nor act, nor know itself as a self, nor think. Tucker’s naturalistic
sympathies ran deep.

Beginning with a view of self as immaterial soul which might have placed

him in the seventeenth century, Tucker could not accept that the soul thinks
independently of the body and then through its mental activity affects the body.
Instead of this, he claimed that ‘a pure creative spirit [would be] no more a
thinking than a walking or speaking substance’. He said that the faculty of
thinking, or reasoning’, rather than ‘a primary property of the mind’, is a product
of its ‘composition with a certain system of matter’, namely, a fine corporeal
substance, which he called ‘mental organization’ (Tucker 1763a:76).

Tucker claimed that the same spirit could attach itself to different human

bodies. In this, he departed even further from Descartes, Clarke, and Butler.
Tucker claimed that the spirit could not carry any residue of its previous bodily
existences with it. In attaching itself to different bodies it would become
different persons. Thus, it follows, on his view, that identity of spirit has little
to do with personal identity. And he had another reason, connected with his
recognition of the importance of self-concern, for denying that identity of spirit
has much to do with personal identity. He said that ‘our concern lies only with
the future and it behoves us to shape our behaviour in such a manner as may
make our condition happy hereafter’, and that ‘If we could demonstrate our
Pre-existence ever so clearly, we could not expect to know what passed with us
in that state, nor gather from thence a fund of experience whereon to build
observations for regulating our future conduct’ (Ibid.: 171). So, our pre-
existence does not matter to us.

But, then, why should our post-existence (in the afterlife) matter? Wouldn’t

our future self be in the same position of ignorance with respect to our present
life as we are with respect to any previous life? And if it would be, why should
we concern ourselves with a future existence? Tucker devoted most of the third
volume of The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), particularly in a chapter titled
‘The Vision’, to answering such questions. In that chapter, which is purportedly
based on a dream, Tucker leaves his body to converse with departed souls,
with whom he discusses his theory of the afterlife. In this conversation, Locke
is his guide.

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Tucker introduced his ‘Vision’ chapter with two others, one on the ‘vehicular

state’, which deals with the state of existence after death, and the other on the
‘Mundane soul’. So far as the vehicular state is concerned, his main idea is that
personal identity, or sense of self, can be maintained by a spirit only when it is
attached to some material body, organized so that it can use the body to perceive
and act. He suggested that the spirit, when in a living human being, is located in
the brain and has a fragile threadlike, ‘vehicular’ body that allows it access to
different regions of the brain. When the human dies, the vehicular body becomes
released from the brain and drifts off into ordinary, physical space, where it enables
the spirit to interact with other spirits, in similar states. However, this vehicular
state is temporary.

Once the spirit departs from its earthly body, it can no longer remember who it

is. At first, it does not even know how to use its vehicular body. It has to learn how
to do this from other spirits, who act as educators. The spirit’s human life, and the
good or evil it there performed, affects its ability to learn since it has residues or
‘concretions’ of earthly existence. These do not include any memories of its earthly
life, which were stored in the brain itself, but only some of the previous person’s
acquired dispositions, the good ones helping it to learn easily in the afterlife and
encouraging joy, the evil ones inhibiting its ability to learn and encouraging
suffering. Only when a spirit has been in the vehicular state for some time does it
finally discover who it was as an individual on earth. For this, it must wait for
others to inform it of its past life, through a special form of communication available
in the vehicular state. Such communication eventually provides the spirit with
knowledge of both its earthly inner and outer life. Its inner life is known to other
spirits by means of their having observed its outer expression, when it was connected
to a body on earth.

The vehicular state is only a temporary one. Good spirits exist or will exist in

this state for a shorter period than evil spirits. Once all the negative dispositions
have worn themselves out, the vehicular body becomes flexible and airy. It is then
released and the spirit joins the mundane soul, a kind of collective unity of all
purified spirits. When this happens to an individual spirit, it entirely loses its sense
of identity and becomes just one more spirit in the mundane soul.

The mundane soul is the collective unity of all spirits, each of which, though

qualitatively identical to each of the others, has its own powers of perception and
action. Such powers are the creative source for all activity in the universe. As a
host of others before him had also claimed, Tucker thought that pure matter, or
hyle, as he called it, does not have any powers of its own, except the capacity to
move as an effect of something else acting on it. In contrast to Clarke, Newton, and
Berkeley, for whom God was the source of all activity in the universe except what
occurs through impact, in Tucker’s view, the mundane soul is responsible. He said
that all organized objects and events are under the control of particular spirits.

Initially, immaterial spirits in the mundane soul are without any special

identity whatsoever. Each, initially, is a perfect copy of the initial state of each
of the others. Tucker realized that in thus stripping the soul of its associated

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mental dispositions, he thereby raised the issue of whether in the soul’s
persisting, what matters in survival has been preserved. In his view, it has been
preserved, but for a curious reason. The soul, freed of its association with the
vehicular body, ‘becomes reabsorbed into the ocean from whence she sprung’,
which is the soul’s highest good. Thus, the cycle is completed. Individual spirits
begin in the mundane soul; then some of them enter into union with an earthly
body; then, at bodily death, they leave their earthly bodies, but with a fragile
vehicular body; finally, they shed their vehicular bodies to become reabsorbed
into the mundane soul. In Tucker’s view, ‘the most desirable thing for Psyche
[“the soul”] would be not to have been born [as a human or any other sort of
organism] at all, and the next [most] desirable to have died as soon as [it was]
born’, before it acquired accretions (Tucker 1768–77:v.3, 561). Yet, spirits in
the mundane soul have no experiences that are uniquely their own since they
are in perfect communication with each other. Some of them never become
material beings. Others become anything from a plant, to an animal, to a human.
But the personalities that spirits acquire as humans are materially based.
Ultimately, as we have seen, the spirits shed their human personalities and are
left with none of their own. Clearly, there was nothing mundane about Tucker’s
spirit!

In the last volume of Tucker’s The Light of Nature Pursued (1768–77), he

discussed Lucretius on personal identity and self-concern (see Introduction,
n.1) in the course of reflecting on Law’s, recently published, forensic
interpretation of Locke. Tucker granted to Law that his interpretation is an
accurate reading of Locke’s position, but he felt that this approach, whatever
practical uses it may have, for instance, in convincing Christians that they ought
to be concerned about their continued consciousness into the afterlife, is not
adequate to determine what metaphysically constitutes personal identity. To
show this, he considered the idea proposed by the anonymous writer to which
Law had responded, who had proposed that ‘continuation of thought’ constitutes
personal identity.

As a prelude to considering this interpretation, Tucker wrote

that although ‘romantic suppositions’, that is hypothetical examples of
impossible situations, ‘I find, are not to everybody’s likeing’, the anonymous
author surely ‘will not be angry with me for making them, because he practices
the like himself’. So:

Let him [the anonymous author] then please to suppose a new Planet
or habitable Earth created with a thousand men, who should
continue to think during their abode thereon: but at the end of twenty
years one half of them were annihilated, and as many new men
created in their room, who should begin to think the moment the
former left off. Suppose farther, that after a second twenty years
the remaining half of the first men, were likewise annihilated, and
succeeded by an equal number of fresh men, who should go on
with their trains of thought for a third score of years. Here would

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be just a thousand uninterrupted continuations of thought, and no
more, during the whole time: yet who will say the men of the last
score were the same persons with those of the first?

Tucker then attributed to the anonymous author the view that people ‘think without
ceasing’ and that ‘it is our thinking that makes us persons; for the table which
never thinks, is no person’.

Be it so: then our thinking constitutes us persons; but what constitutes
us different persons? for I am not you, nor you me. Surely not our
thinking, for in that respect we are exactly the same: what else then
can it be unless our substantial or numerical diversity? We may have
different heights, shapes, gaits, gestures, voices, or wear different
coloured cloaths, and folks may know us from one another by those
marks: but these are evidences of our being different persons, not
what constitutes us such. Neither in our fictitious Planet, can you
ever make out a thousand continuations subsisting at one time, any
otherwise than by considering them as the thoughts of so many
persons, each distinguished from the rest in some other respect than
that of their thinking. Thus you see the same objection actually lies
against the continuation, as I had supposed lying against
consciousness.

(Tucker 1768–77:v.7, 6–8)

Tucker concluded that ‘the idea of person must precede that of continuation: so
it is no help to tell me I may find my personality by my continuation, because I
must settle my idea of personality before I can make use of the explanation’.

Soon after, Tucker turns to a discussion of Lucretius and self-concern, claiming

that Lucretius took advantage of a ‘prejudice among mankind’ to lure young
recruits to his cause ‘by the promise of an indemnity for all the wicked-ness they
might please to commit: well knowing that any specious sophisms would serve
to prove his point, if he could once get them to wish it true’.

For if the soul be nothing more than a result from the dispositions of
certain material atoms in a very curious organization, whenever the
organization is broken up, there is an end of the soul, and all possibility
of punishment removed. It had been objected against him, that since
chance never ceases working, she might at some future time cast the
same atoms together again into an arrangement precisely the same
with that they stand in at present, in which case the same soul must
return. He granted that to deny he ever was the same as the previous
Lucretius.

ucker continued:

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And your friend [by proposing that continuation of thinking is
sufficient for personal identity] in like manner has fortified me
against all alarm of a future reckoning. If your God designed me an
accountable creature, he has managed very ill in making me mortal,
because he will thereby put it out of his own power ever to call me
to an account hereafter. What if he should work a resurrection of
my atoms, and set them a thinking again? this would be a new
creation, another continuation of a thought, another person, not
me, nor anywise affecting me. Therefore, I will think freely and act
freely, kiss the girls and put the bottle about, as long as I can: and
when I can think and act no longer, then good night to you all, I
shall sleep sound enough, I warrant. Why should Lucry the Second
care what becomes of Lucry the Third? let the devils pinch, and
scourge, and burn, till they are tired, I shall feel nothing of them.
But sure he can never be so unjust as to have another boy flogged
for naughty tricks played by me.

He then excused the anonymous author; and, no doubt, Law as well because of
his Christian beliefs, but expressed concern about ‘freethinkers’ that would
need more convincing in order to live a moral life. Finally, he concluded that
while ‘consciousness may do well enough for Mr. Locke’s purpose, and that
most useful one of impressing the idea of an after-reckoning upon the
generality’, for the purpose ‘of accurately understanding our nature, I humbly
conceive it necessary to place the identity of the person in that of the substance,
and its essence in the faculty of perceptivity’ (Ibid.: 13–17).

Even though Tucker was undaunted by metaphysical extravagance, he tried

to empirically ground his bizarre speculations. In the case of humans, his
immaterial spirits are little more than placeholders for unknown functions of
the brain that provide unity to perceptions. They have no ‘lives’ of their own.
All of the functions the spirits perform in a human depend on physical properties
of the human. And a spirit’s personality is simply that of its associated human’s
brain. All that is required to convert a theory like Tucker’s into one like
Priestley’s, to be discussed in a moment, is to give matter power both to think
and to unify experiences.

Although Tucker admired Hartley, he thought that Hartley’s mechanistic

theory was naive. But Tucker was not opposed to mechanism per se. However,
since he could not see how matter could either think or be active entirely on its
own, he posited immaterial spirits to perform these functions. But then he gave
them no independent earthly life of their own. Priestley, on the other hand,
adopted the mechanistic theory of Hartley and saw that if matter could think
there was no need to posit anything immaterial. At about the same time, Kant
saw more clearly the problems of unity of mind that bothered Tucker but never
bothered Priestley. Of course, Kant also argued that metaphysical flights of
fancy, such as Tucker’s, are worse than useless. And Hazlitt, who held Tucker

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in the highest esteem, would on the basis of more naturalistic ideas, but similar
concerns, anticipate much that is central to the debate in our own times over
personal identity and what matters in survival.

Thomas Reid

Reid entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, when he was 12 years old. He was
the student of George Turnbull, who, along with Francis Hutcheson, was one
of the initiators of the Scottish Enlightenment. Turnbull accepted Berkeley’s
immaterialism, but was interested in applying the methods of natural science
to pneumatology and moral philosophy, in addition to vision. Reid became
attracted to pneumatology through Turnbull, and wholeheartedly accepted his
views, including the idea that ‘common sense’ should be the final arbiter in all
questions. However, in 1739, when Reid was introduced to Hume’s Treatise,
he abandoned his commitment to Berkeley. Apparently what most disturbed
him upon reading Hume, was not that the existence of a material world was
called into question (Berkeley had already done that), but the rejection of
spiritual substance.

At the time of his introduction to Hume, Reid was a pastor at New Machar,

a post which he held for nine years. He went from there to Aberdeen. And in
1763 he was offered the post of moral philosophy at Glasgow, replacing the
retiring Adam Smith. The following year he published An Inquiry into the
Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Ten years later, this
book was criticized by Priestley, who as a scientific materialist argued against
the authority of common sense (Priestley 1774). Reid did not respond
immediately, except for an anonymously published review of Priestley’s
subsequent republication of Hartley’s work (Priestley 1775; Wood 1995:35–
6). It seems likely, however, that Reid’s next two books were, in part, a response
to Priestley. In them, Reid defended common sense and tried on empirical
grounds to justify believing in a distinct mental or spiritual realm, not reducible
to the material, to be studied by different methods. Subsequently, many thinkers
would agree with Reid on his methodological point without sharing his
commitment to the immaterial soul.

Reid was an exemplary empirical methodologist. He believed strongly that

Newtonian methods could be applied to the mental or spiritual world. Hume,
of course, had made a similar suggestion, but Reid was more consistent than
Hume in putting it into practice. One of Reid’s main criticisms of Hume was
that Hume’s suppositions about the relations between impressions and ideas
could not be justified empirically, given what was known about how the senses
functioned. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), Reid drew
the consequence, in apparent reference to Hume, that, ‘if we conceive the mind
to be immaterial—of which I think we have very strong proofs—we shall find
it difficult to affix a meaning to [the words] impressions made upon it’ (Reid
1785:254).

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Also in the Essays, Reid criticized Hume for supposing that there is nothing

more to mind than a ‘succession of related ideas and impressions, of which we
have an intimate memory and consciousness’. Reid pointed out that on this view
of mind, all agency is lost. He asked ‘to be farther instructed, whether the
impressions remember and are conscious of the ideas, or the ideas remember and
are conscious of the impressions, or if both remember and are conscious of both?
and whether the ideas remember those that come after them, as well as those that
were before them?’ His point was that since ideas and impressions are passive,
they cannot do anything, whereas Hume implies that the ‘succession of ideas and
impressions not only remembers and is conscious’ but also ‘judges, reasons, affirms,
denies’, even ‘eats and drinks, and is sometimes merry and sometimes sad’. Reid
concluded, ‘If these things can be ascribed to a succession of ideas and impressions
in a consistency of common sense, I should be very glad to know what is nonsense’
(Ibid.: 444).

In these criticisms, Reid, the immaterialist about the mind, criticized Hume, the

immaterialist about everything, for not being able to explain, on immaterialist
grounds, the difference between impressions and ideas. Here, Reid did not criticize
Hume’s metaphysics so much as his account of the origins of ideas. As we have
seen, Reid argued that, on Hume’s view, in which substance has no place, agency
would have no place either. Reid thought it would be absurd to deny agency; so,
substance had to be reintroduced. But even though Reid assumed that the need for
substance is an argument for immaterial substance, actually, so far as his argument
goes, it merely shows the need for substance of some sort. In any case, this is one
of the few places in Reid’s published work where his metaphysics of the soul may
have made a substantive difference to the scientific account he was trying to develop.

In his first book, on Common Sense (1764), Reid insisted on a rigorous

introspective method for the discovery of the principles by which we sense and
perceive the external world.

Reid not only appealed to introspection but insisted

that it was essential in knowing the mind. Here Reid’s methodological innovations
were relatively free of their metaphysical underpinning, which is partly why they
could be so consequential later, to thinkers who did not share his commitment to
the immaterial soul.

Reid had learned from Hume that laws of the natural world could be known

only as causal regularities and only inductively. In his later works, he insisted that
knowledge of mental phenomena is different. Only through introspection can we
acquire direct knowledge of ourselves as agents. Since we are the agents of our
actions, Reid reasoned that our actions cannot be understood in terms of mere
regularities, but only as relations involving necessity. He claimed further that the
mental is not directly accessible to us through physiological investigations, which
could only provide material for speculation. Thus, on what he took to be empirical
grounds, Reid defended a methodological dualism that is committed to a separation
of mental from physical science. He believed that the study of the physical or
natural world had to be kept distinct from the study of the mental and that
there are no intelligible laws joining these two.

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However, Reid’s dualism, for all its apparent dependence on a modest

empiricism, was metaphysically based. His career as a whole shows a clear
attempt to defend traditional Christian beliefs about the soul and the afterlife
against the skeptical onslaught of Hume and the materialism of Priestley.
Although, in his published works, Reid’s modesty and desire to develop an
empirically based mental science kept him from often revealing his religious
or metaphysical views, they nevertheless do appear there occasionally, and
much more frequently in the lectures upon which his published works were
based.

Perhaps most revealing of Reid’s metaphysical position, is the introductory

lecture to his course on ‘pneumatology, ethics, and politics’, recently published
from hand-written manuscripts. In this lecture, he first suggests that ethics and
politics depend so much on pneumatology, that they ‘can not be understood
nor treated scientifically’ unless they are built upon it. He then described
pneumatology, in a passage almost identical to that found in the later-written
preface to his Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785):

All Human Knowledge is employed either about Body or Mind,
about things Material or things Intellectual. The whole System of
Bodies in the Universe, of which we know but a very little part,
may be called the Material World; And the whole System of Minds
or thinking Beings in the Universe, from the Infinite Creator to the
meanest Creature endued with thought, may be called the
Intellectual World. About the one or the other of these or something
pertaining to them all Sciences treat, & all Arts are occupied. Those
are the two great Kingdoms of Nature to which human thought is
limited. Nor can the boldest flight of Imagination carry beyond
their limits.

(Reid 1990:103)

Reid imagined here a great divide between the sciences of nature and mind.
But he also wondered if there might be a middle ground:

Whether there be in the Universe any other kinds of being, which
are neither Extended Solid and inert like Body, nor thinking &
intelligent like Mind is beyond the Reach of our Knowledge; and
therefore it would be rash to determine. There is indeed a vast
interval between Body & Mind; whether there may be some
intermediate Substance that connects them together we know not.
We have no Reason to ascribe Intelligence, or even Sensation to
Plants, yet there is an active Force and Energy in them which cannot
be the result of any arrangement of inert Matter. The same thing
may be said of those active Powers by which animals grow & by
which Matter gravitates, by which Electrical & Magnetical Bodies

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attract and repell each other, & by which the parts of Solid Bodies
cohere. Some have conjectured that the Phenomena of the Material
World which require active Force are produced by the continual
operation of intelligent Beings. Others have conjectured that there
may be in the Universe Beings that are active without Intelligence,
which as a kind of incorporeal Machinery contrived by the supreme
Wisdom perform their destined task without any Knowledge or
Intention. But laying aside conjecture & all pretence to form
Determinations in things beyond the reach of the human faculties
we must rest in this that Body and Mind are the only kinds of Being
of which we have any Knowledge or can form any Conception.

(Ibid.: 103–4)

Reid concluded that ‘If there are other kinds they are not discoverable by the
faculties which God hath given us’, then ‘with regard to us’ they are ‘as if they
were not’. He maintained, with Berkeley but against Priestley, that there is no
reason to take matter alone as having any active powers, let alone such powers
as might account for life and mentality. The result of Reid’s empirical strategy
was to open up a vast chasm between body and mind.

Reid next turned to pneumatology, first indicating that although there may

be a great variety of ‘Minds or Thinking Beings Throughout this vast Universe’
we cannot know them. Unlike Grove, Reid limited pneumatology to minds
that are either directly accessible or whose activities can be understood through
analogy with our own mind. This included Brutes and God, but excluded
‘Angels’, who can be known only through the ‘Doctrine of Revelation’ and do
‘not belong to Philosophy but to theology’. Reid’s pneumatology, thus, differed
from Grove’s in being less about ‘spirits’ per se, than about mind in
manifestations accessible to empirical study (Ibid.: 104–5).

In Reid’s view, the first branch of pneumatology ‘treats of the human Mind,

To which Wolfius has given the name of Psychologie’, while ‘the other treats
of the Supreme Mind, and commonly goes by the name of Natural Theology’.
He noted that ‘as the human Mind seems to be possessed of all the Faculties
which we observe in Brutes, besides some of a Superior Nature of which there
is no appearance in the most sagacious Brutes; there is no Necessity for treating
separately the Minds of Brutes’ (Ibid.: 105).

Earlier, Christian Wolff had written two works, Psychologia Empirica (1738)

and Psychologia Rationalis (1740), in which he divided psychology into two
disciplines, one empirical, and one rational (or, a priori). Eventually, rational
psychology fell by the wayside, partly due to the influence of Kant. By the
mid-nineteenth century the term psychology had been generally adopted for
the science of mind, displacing the term pneumatology. So, for instance, to
Reid’s statement in the preface to his Essays on the Intellectual Powers that
‘the branch which treats of the nature and operations of minds has, by some,
been called Pneumatology’, Hamilton added the footnote: ‘Now properly

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superseded by the term Psychology; to which no competent objection can be
made’, which yields the ‘convenient adjective, psychological’ (Reid 1863:v.1,
217). In the Essays, Reid does not actually characterize his own work as
pneumatology, but says that ‘some’ have labelled the science that treats ‘of the
nature and operations of minds’ pneumatology. In the lectures, he takes up the
topics of Natural Theology and rational psychology, which in the Essays are
not considered. It is perhaps the different goals of the Essays and Reid’s Lectures
that caused him to be more reserved in the Essays.

This difference in emphasis can be seen in how Reid continued:

We are therefore First to treat of the human Mind which is one
constituent part of Man & the noblest part; & here we shall
endeavour first to explain as distinctly as we are able the various
powers and Faculties of the human Mind & then shew what Reason
discovers of its nature & duration whether it be material or
immaterial Whether we have reason to think that it shall perish
with the Body or continue to live in some future State.

(Reid 1990:105)

This passage does not appear in the preface to the Essays, though the preceding
and subsequent passages are included. Undoubtedly, this passage indicates that
Reid’s lectures included both empirical and rational psychology, both of which
were part of typical courses on pneumatology, such as Grove’s, but would be
inappropriate in a book, such as Reid’s Essays, in which the author intended to
deal purely with empirical psychology.

In Reid’s lectures on rational psychology (which have not yet been

published), he argued against the possibility of thinking matter and in favour
of a simple immaterial substance, naturally immortal, as the essence of the
human mind. In his recently published papers on ‘animate creation’, he argued
against materialism, showing in the process that he not only had read the earlier
debate between Clarke and Collins but strongly sided with Clarke (Wood 1995):

If Mr. Locke had believed that the essential Qualities of Matter and
of thought are such as that both cannot subsist in the same Subject,
he certainly would have changed his Opinion. Since Mr. Locke
wrote two attempts [by Clarke and Euler] have been made to prove
this, by which the immateriality of thinking substances is put in a
clearer Light than it was before. Dr. Samuel Clarke one of the
greatest Metaphysicians of this Age, has endeavoured to shew that
the divisibility of Matter is inconsistent with its being the Subject
of Thought. Matter is made up of parts each of which is a distinct
Substance & has its own inherent Qualities. Every Quality in the
whole is compounded of parts of the same Quality inherent in some
or in all the parts of the compound substance. Every part being a

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distinct Substance whatever is inherent in one part cannot be the
same that is inherent in another part. External Denomentations such
as Figure or Place or Use may be common to the Whole, but no
inherent Quality can. Thinking is an inherent Quality in its proper
Subject, the thinking Being. To suppose one part of a thought to be
in one Substance and another part of the same Thought in another
Substance appears to be absurd. The Subject of Thought therefore
must be one individual Substance. But no Matter nor part of Matter
is one individual Substance & therefore Matter cannot be the Subject
of Thought.

(Ibid.: 230–1)

Reid added:

This Argument was fully examined by Mr. Collins the most Acute
of those who took to themselves the name of Freethinkers. His
Objections & Dr. Clarks Answers (which appear to me very
satisfying) are extant in several Replies & Duplies. of which
therefore I shall say nothing more.

(Ibid.: 231)

Thus, the battle, in Reid’s view, was as much religious as scientific.

In his earlier unpublished manuscript review of Priestley’s book on Hartley,

an edited version of which appeared anonymously in Monthly Review, Reid
wrote of Priestley’s essay on materialism:

It has been thought that Dr. Sam Clark has demonstrated the
impossibility of Matter’s being the Subject of Thought. But we learn
from Dr. Priestley that all was labour in vain. That perception and
all the mental Powers of Man are the Result of such an Organical
Structure as that of the brain…. How would Epicurus? How would
Hobbes? How would Collins have triumphed had they lived to see
this point given up to them, even by a Christian Divine?

(Ibid.: 133)

It is the Christians versus the pagans, with Priestley in the role of a double-
agent, posing as a Divine in order to sap the Christians’ moral fiber from within.

In his published works, Reid tried to be more rigorously scientific. In Essays

on the Intellectual Powers, he observed that ‘In the gradual progress of man,
from infancy to maturity, there is a certain order in which his faculties are
unfolded…. The external senses appear first; memory soon follows’ (Reid
1785:339). Thus, as we saw also in the case of Hartley, by the time Reid wrote,
the idea of thinking about the human mind as a developmental process had
begun to take hold. Reid then distinguished between the senses and memory

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on the grounds that the senses ‘give us information of things only as they exist in
the present moment’, while memory gives us ‘immediate knowledge of things
past’. However, in both cases, the person involved is related directly to the object
in question, not indirectly through the medium of an ‘idea’ or any other sort of
mental representation. This was part of Reid’s response to what he saw as the
assumptions which led to the skeptical consequences of ‘the way of ideas’. Further,
in Reid’s view, when we are remembering some event in the past, we know
immediately, and in virtue of the act of remembering itself, rather than by
inference from something else, both that we are remembering and that the object
of memory is in the past, that is, that we believe in the existence of the objects of
memory as existing in the past. However, such knowledge, though immediate,
depends on the prior development of the faculty of memory.

In what is another good illustration of Reid’s interest in developmental issues,

he remarked that in the case of children or people who are mentally impaired,
memory may fail to give rise to belief in what is remembered and imagination
may give rise to belief in what is imagined. Yet, ‘in mature years, and in a sound
state of mind, every man feels that he must believe what he distinctly remembers,
though he can give no other reason of his belief, but that he remembers the thing
distinctly; whereas, when he merely imagines a thing ever so distinctly, he has
no belief of it upon that account’ (Ibid.: 340). In a subsequent chapter, Reid
suggested that infants, before they acquire the capacity to reflect on their own
thoughts, tend to be totally absorbed in their perceptions, and may not then
distinguish memory from imagination but that later they will be able to distinguish
between perception, memory, and imagination.

In his account of personal identity, Reid began by noting that ‘the conviction

which every man has of his Identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs no
aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it, without first
producing some degree of insanity’. Thus, ‘there can be no memory of what is
past without the conviction that we existed at the time remembered’. Reid
continued, ‘There may be good arguments to convince me that I existed before
the earliest thing I can remember; but to suppose that my memory reaches a
moment farther back than my belief and conviction of my existence, is a
contradiction’ (Ibid.: 344). Although Reid did not specifically say so, he seemed
to suppose that, if we are rational, we automatically take ownership of the past
thoughts, experiences, and actions that we remember. It seems, then, that Reid’s
continuing commitment to a reflexive account at least of memory, if not of all
consciousness, may have prevented him from extending his new approach to a
developmental account of the acquisition of self-concepts. In any case, Reid
clearly has the view that we earlier speculated that Locke might have held: that
while self-conceptions only kick in after a certain amount of psychological
development, once they do kick in, they kick in as a whole, and not just piecemeal.

If a person loses conviction in the existence of the past—Reid was here

thinking of what he took to be possible cases of amnesia—then ‘past things are
done away; and in his own belief, he only then [at that moment] begins to

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exist. Whatever was thought, or said, or done, or suffered before that period,
may belong to some other person; but he can never impute it to himself, or take
any subsequent step that supposes it to be his doing’ (Ibid.). Although Reid
here sounds Lockean, he does not really mean that people do not exist prior to
the time of their earliest memories. Probably what he means (perhaps in implicit
if only partial acknowledgement of Locke’s views on appropriation) is that—
subjectively, so far as the person’s own phenomenological sense of who they
are and what belongs to them, as part of them, is concerned, and not taking
into account the corrections that people make on intellectual grounds to that
subjective sense of who they are—we impute to ourselves only events that
happened during periods after which we began remembering.

Reid expressed a view about unity of consciousness that Kant developed

about the same time, although almost surely Reid did not know of Kant’s view:

We may observe, first of all, that this conviction [’which every man
has of his identity as far back as his memory reaches’] is
indispensably necessary to all exercise of reason. The operations
of reason, whether in action or in speculation, are made up of
successive parts. The antecedent are the foundation of the
consequent, and, without the conviction that the antecedent had
been seen or done by me, I could have no reason to procede to the
consequent, in any speculation, or in any active project whatever.

(Ibid.)

In concluding this thought, Reid remarked that ‘it is evident that we must have
the conviction of our own continued existence and identity, as soon as we are
capable of thinking or doing anything, on the account of what we have thought,
or done, or suffered before, that is, as soon as we are reasonable creatures’.

Reid then turned to an investigation of ‘what is meant by identity in general,

what by our own personal identity, and how we are led into that invincible
belief and conviction which every man has of his own personal identity, as far
as memory reaches’. He claimed that identity is too simple a concept to be
defined, though ‘every man of common sense has a clear and distinct notion’
of identity and that it ‘supposes an uninterrupted continuance of existence’.
However, in the case of the concept of person, ‘it is, perhaps, more difficult to
ascertain with precision the meaning of Personality; but it is not necessary in
the present subject: it is sufficient for our purpose to observe, that all mankind
place their personality in something that cannot be divided or consist of parts.
A part of the person is a manifest absurdity’ (Ibid.: 344–5).

Reid continued:

My personal identity, therefore, implies the continued existence of
that indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may
be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and

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acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling;
I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and
actions, and feelings, change every moment—they have no
continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which
they belong, is permanent, and has the same relation to all the
succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings, which I call mine.

(Ibid.: 345)

The supposition here is that our notion of ourselves is of an indivisible and
continued ‘monad’ which remains identical to itself, even though its properties
constantly change.

But is this notion of ourselves as an indivisible monad ‘merely a fancy

without reality?’ The skeptic will ask, ‘What evidence have you, that there is
such a permanent self which has a claim to all the thoughts, actions, and feelings,
which you call yours?’ Reid answers: ‘remembrance’.

I remember that, twenty years ago, I conversed with such a person;
I remember several things that passed in that conversation; my
memory testifies not only that this was done, but that it was done
by me who now remember it. If it was done by me, I must have
existed at that time, and continued to exist from that time to the
present: if the identical person whom I call myself, had not a part
in that conversation, my memory is fallacious—it gives a distinct
and positive testimony of what is not true. Every man in his senses
believes what he distinctly remembers, and everything he
remembers convinces him that he existed at the time remembered.

(Ibid.)

We also believe we existed at times for which we have no memories but for
which we have evidence of our existence, based upon the reports of others.
However, in Reid’s view, in comparison with memory, such testimony provides
inferior evidence of identity.

Reid asserted that ‘we probably at first derive our notion of identity from

that natural conviction which every man has from the dawn of reason of his
own identity and continued existence’. The conviction is of the identity and
continued existence of a simple, indivisible self, not of that self’s operations.
In Reid’s view, ‘the operations of our minds are all successive, and have no
continued existence. But the thinking being has a continued existence; and we
have an invincible belief that it remains the same when all its thoughts and
operations change’. Thus, ‘the identity of a person is a perfect identity’ that
‘admits of no degrees’ (Ibid.). The identities of other things, by contrast, at
least in so far as their identities can be known, whether of objects or of other
persons, is imperfect. These other identities are known only through external
perception of similarity, which in the absence of evidence to the contrary, can

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be sufficient to establish them. However, each of us has a certain knowledge,
based on memory, of our own identity over time, and we willingly generalize
such identity to other human beings. In the case of other material objects,
however, identity is determined based on verbal agreement, since the matter
out of which such objects are composed constantly changes.

From a scientific point of view, Reid’s common sense epistemology and

psychology of mind was in many ways an advance upon his predecessors. He
took as given the world as it appears to us and tried to determine what mental
faculties would give rise to our experiencing such a world. Whatever the
philosophical merits of such an approach, it can have advantages scientifically.
Reid’s theory of perception is a case in point. It is superior to a kind of theory
that could be based on a much more skeptical approach, such as Hume’s. But,
in other contexts, Reid too sometimes confused epistemology and psychology.
Because he believed that the experience of mental unity, and the evidences of
memory, reveal that we are essentially simple, unified mental beings, not
decomposable like matter, he believed that he was warranted in concluding
that the mind is an immaterial substance, and that body and mind must be
investigated in separate sciences. Kant, in the first Critique, which was written
close in time to Reid’s Essays, would argue more perceptively that this sort of
reliance on rational psychology yields only paralogisms of reason and is, hence,
invalid. A problem with Reid’s approach in such instances, is that he sometimes
took as epistemological intuition what was merely psychological illusion. And
he did this because he did not recognize adequately the relevance of folk-
psychological and cultural influences on what appears to be solidly based in
common sense. Hence, at a fundamental level his common sense philosophy
sometimes became entangled with his scientific psychology.

Joseph Priestley

Priestley and Reid provide an interesting contrast. Both were Christian ministers
who spent much of their careers as teachers, engaged in advancing science and
writing on philosophical issues. However, Reid’s scientific and philosophical
interests focused mainly on investigating the human mind, while Priestley’s
focused mainly on chemistry, electricity, and promoting materialism. In
Priestley’s view, the science of mind (‘knowledge of ourselves’) was not a
dream but a reality, for which Hartley deserved most of the credit: ‘Something
was done in this field of knowledge by Descartes, very much by Mr. Locke,
but most of all by Dr. Hartley’. Priestley then added, in a frenzy of hyperbole,
that Hartley ‘has thrown more useful light upon the theory of the mind than
Newton did upon the theory of the natural world’ (Priestley 1774: 2). Priestley’s
own interest in the science of mind was limited mainly to a critique of the
philosophy of common sense, which included Reid’s own first work, and to
propagating a materialistic version of Hartley’s associationist psychology
(Priestley 1774, 1775). Priestley also wrote two philosophical works on matter,

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spirit, and necessarianism, in which he defended materialism pretty much as
materialists today often defend it (Priestley 1777; Priestley and Price 1778).
Whereas most eighteenth-century materialists viewed matter as entirely passive,
in Priestley’s view, it was essentially active. Priestley claimed that attraction
and repulsion are responsible for all of the energetic powers of matter. Going
further, his research into chemistry included investigations of photosynthesis
and the role of oxygen in animal life. As such, he contributed importantly to
the development of nineteenth century biochemistry.

Needless to add, in their metaphysical and religious views also, Reid and

Priestley contrasted sharply. While Reid held on conservatively to the traditional
belief in an immaterial soul or mind, Priestley embraced materialism, with
little concern about tradition, so long as he could maintain his own liberal
version of Christianity. The latter was so liberal, that many Christians, including
Reid, looked on him as a pariah, while atheists tended to accept him as one of
their own. Yet, Priestley, like Hartley, was a paradigm of that fusion of theologian
and scientist that flourished during the Enlightenment, particularly in England.
He faced the facts of science and history head on, and modified his Christianity
so as to make faith consistent with reason.

Such differences between Reid and Priestley were reflected in their respective

approaches to understanding the human mind. Reid, though an empiricist,
assumed that the relations between mind and body could never be worked out
entirely by empirical methods. Furthermore, he claimed that all hypotheses
not based directly on observation of nature or of mind should be avoided, and
that ‘common sense’ should be relied on to provide the basic truths upon which
all else is built. In contrast, Priestley, impressed by the success of material
science and of certain simply expressed hypotheses about the human mind,
embraced a general theory based on a materialist philosophy and an
associationist psychology. At the same time he criticized Reid’s system for its
plethora of instincts and unnecessary first principles, and for its being based
on common sense rather than on science. In sum, while Reid used his inductive
empiricism to resist materialism, Priestley used his more deductive scientific
approach to promote it.

In Priestley’s view, Reid’s tendency to rely on first principles sinned against

the simplicity of nature, as well as against Hartley’s insights. In addition,
Priestley thought advertising principles as ‘instinctive’ impeded inquiry into
their justification. To illustrate how much Reid relied on instinctive principles,
arranged in no particular order, Priestley made up a table of twelve of them, of
which he remarked, ‘My reader will, I suspect, imagine with me, that this
catalogue of original instinctive principles is pretty large, and that when nature
had gone so far in this track, but little could be wanting to accomplish all her
purposes; and that, with respect to principles, little remained to be done by any
other means’. Reid, Priestley continued, ‘thinks differently’ (Priestley 1774:9).
Priestley then quoted Reid as having said that since ‘the original perceptions
which nature gives are insufficient for the purposes of life’ nature ‘has made

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men capable of acquiring many more perceptions by habit’. Priestley says that
it is his own objective ‘to relieve dame nature of the unnecessary load which
Dr. Reid has laid upon her, by ascribing a little more to habit, and to the
necessary connections and consequences of things than he has done’. Indeed,
Priestley would ascribe a lot more to habit, or rather to ‘the association of
ideas’, which, in his view, is often an unconscious process. He concluded that
much reliance on ‘ultimate principles necessarily checks all farther inquiry,
and is therefore of great disservice in philosophy’. In fact, Priestley suggests,
all of Reid’s instinctive principles are ‘actually acquired’, and ‘nothing more
than so many different cases of the old and well known principle of association
of ideas’ (Ibid.: 18–19, 22–3).

As an example of the power of habit to explain, Priestley cites the case of

his own playing of the flute. He says that ‘though I am no great proficient on
the instrument, there are some tunes which I now very often play without ever
attending to my fingers, or explicitly to the tune’.

Now, reasoning as Dr. Reid does, I should conclude that, in this
case, no skill, acquired by habit, was employed, but that my fingers
were guided by some original instinctive principle; and if I had
been able to do this earlier than my remembrance of any thing, I
must have said that this was one of those powers, which, being
latent in the mind, was called forth by proper circumstances.
Whereas, I think it more natural to say, that the association between
the ideas of certain sounds and the cause of certain motions of the
fingers became in time so perfect, that the one introduced the other,
without any attention; the intervening express volition, previous to
each motion, having been gradually excluded. Facts of this kind
demonstrate that the power of association is so great, and so
extensive, that even whole trains and very long trains of ideas, are
by this means so connected, that if the first take place, all the rest
will follow of course.

(Ibid.: 69)

By such means, Priestley claimed, Reid’s so-called instinctive principles could
be explained.

Priestley was a gradualist. He saw the differences between humans and other

animals as differences of degree, rather than kind. And, he saw human infants
as starting off more like other animals and only gradually learning adult human
modes of thinking, including even the ability to conceptualize themselves:

We see, then, that a child, or brute animal, is in possession of a
power of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, and, in like manner,
a power of pursuing other intermediate and different objects, in
consequence of impressions made upon their minds by things

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external to them, without their having given any attention to the
affections or operations of their minds; and indeed, consequently,
without having such an idea as that of mind at all, or hardly of self.
Some brute animals may possibly never advance farther than this;
excepting that, their pleasurable and painful impressions being
associated with a variety of particular persons and circumstances,
they will necessarily acquire the rudiments of all the passions, as
of joy and sorrow, love and hatred, gratitude and resentment, hope
and fear, each of which may be as intense, though less complex
than they are found in the human species.

(Ibid.: liv)

In humans, though, Priestley continued, ‘if time and opportunity be given for
the purpose (which, for the reason assigned above, can only be obtained where
there is a considerable compass of intellect, and much exercise of it) the
affections of our ideas are as capable of being the subjects of observation as
the ideas themselves’.

Priestley did not even mention the doctrine of the reflexive nature of

consciousness, which he merely assumed is wrong, an indication of how far
the science of mind had progressed since Clarke’s debate with Collins. And in
Priestley’s supposing that brutes and children differ from adult humans in that
brutes and children do not have second-order reflections, and that as a
consequence their emotions are ‘less complex’, one can glean how far the
science of mind had progressed since Hume. Finally, in Priestley’s suggesting
that children only gradually acquire the concept of themselves, he, in effect,
invited others to explain how the notion of self is gradually acquired. As we
shall see, his student, Hazlitt, accepted the invitation.

Priestley’s rootedness in science, together with the matter of factness of his

materialistic approach, was radically different from the epistemologically
oriented way of ideas approach championed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Although Priestley accepted ‘the way of ideas’, he did not think that it led to
skepticism about the external world, as Reid had claimed, or, indeed, to
skepticism about anything. Priestley was a realist. He did not argue for the
existence of an external world, beyond simply declaring that its existence is
obviously the best explanation of the fact that people report having experiences
in the presence of a common stimulus.

Since realism was so unproblematic for Priestley he made a much cleaner

separation between philosophy and science than Hume, in particular, had been
able to do. Although Priestley did not have a lot to say about personal identity
and did not even discuss fission in his main contribution to the personal identity
debate (he discussed it in correspondence with Price), his understanding of
related issues that fed into Hazlitt’s views and that have played an important
part in the personal identity debates in our own times was more subtle and
clear-headed than perhaps that of any other eighteenth century thinker.

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Priestley’s thoughts on personal identity are primarily his attempt, in response

to criticisms from more conservative Christians, to show that his materialism
is compatible with the Christian idea of resurrection. He claimed, first, that
‘the sentient principle in man’ must be an extended thing. Then, to dismiss the
seemingly strange hypothesis—advocated by various of the Cambridge
Platonists and by Clarke—of an extended, and yet immaterial soul, he asked,
‘how anything can have extension and yet be immaterial without coinciding
with our idea of mere empty space’, and immediately answered, ‘I know not’.
He, thus, concluded that ‘the sentient principle in man, containing ideas which
certainly have parts and are divisible and consequently must have extension,
cannot be that simple, indivisible and immaterial substance that some have
imagined it to be but something that has real extension and therefore may have
the other properties of matter’ (Priestley 1777:163).

As follower of Hartley, Priestley thought that the sentient and thinking

principle in man rather obviously must be ‘a property of the nervous system or
rather of the brain’ (Ibid.). But he went further than Hartley in suggesting not
only that the brain was necessary for human mentality, but that it was sufficient
as well. In Priestley’s view, it was scientifically useless to postulate any
immaterial substance to account for human behavior. All of this will sound
quite modern to us. However, what is truly sophisticated and innovative in
Priestley’s treatment of personal identity is the way he downplays the
importance of personal identity per se and highlights that of the functions that
belief in our own identities actually serves.

Priestley began this part of his discussion by considering an objection, which

he says was made to ‘the primitive Christians, as it may be at present’ that ‘a
proper resurrection is not only, in the highest degree, improbable, but even
actually impossible since, after death, the body putrefies, and the parts that
composed it are dispersed, and form other bodies, which have an equal claim
to the same resurrection’. He continues: ‘And where, they say, can be the
propriety of rewards and punishments, if the man that rises again be not
identically the same with the man that acted and died?’ In reply, he first makes
it clear, as if just for the record, that in his opinion ‘we shall be identically the
same beings after the resurrection that we are at present’. Then, ‘for the sake
of those who may entertain a different opinion’, he proposes to ‘speculate a
little upon their hypothesis’ in order to show that ‘it is not inconsistent with a
state of future rewards and punishments, and that it supplies motives sufficient
for the regulation of our conduct here, with a view to it’ (Ibid.: 165). In other
words, the task that Priestley sets himself is that of showing that even if after
death ‘resurrected selves’ [our term] are not strictly identical to anyone who
existed on Earth it does not make any difference since identity is not what
matters primarily in survival. That this is Priestley’s project becomes especially
clear when he continues: ‘And metaphysical as the subject necessarily is, I do
not despair of satisfying those who will give a due attention to it, that the
propriety of rewards and punishments, with our hopes and fears derived from

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them, do not at all depend upon such a kind of identity as the objection that I
have stated supposes’ (Ibid., emphasis added). Specifically, then, what Priestley
plans to show is that neither the propriety of divine rewards and punishments
nor our anticipatory hopes and fears with regard to the resurrection depends
on their being resurrected persons who are strictly identical with us.

In arguing for this radical new idea, Priestley began by distinguishing

between ‘the identity of the man’ and ‘the identity of the person’. He noted
that it is only the latter—personal identity—that is relevant to the present
discussion. He then claimed that even if people universally and firmly came to
believe that over the course of a year there was a complete change, ‘though
gradual and insensible’, in the matter of which they were composed it ‘would
make no change whatever in our present conduct, or in our sense of obligation,
respecting the duties of life, and the propriety of rewards and punishments;
and consequently all hopes and fears, and expectations of every kind would
operate exactly as before’. For, he said, ‘notwithstanding the complete change
of the man, there would be no change of what I should call the person’. So far
as personal identity is requisite either for the propriety of rewards and
punishments or for the concern that we take for our future selves, Priestley
continued, endorsing Locke, ‘the sameness and continuity of consciousness
seems to be the only circumstance attended to by us’. Then Priestley made it
clear that, in his view, whether identity per se obtains is of no great consequence:

Admitting, therefore, that the man consists wholly of matter, as
much as the river does of water, or the forest of trees, and that this
matter should be wholly changed in the interval between death and
the resurrection; yet, if, after this state, we shall all know one another
again, and converse together as before, we shall be, to all intents
and purposes, the same persons. Our personal identity will be
sufficiently preserved, and the expectation of it at present will have
a proper influence on our conduct.

(Ibid.: 166–7, emphasis added)

By Priestley’s use of the expressions, ‘to all intents and purposes’ and
‘sufficiently’, he here separated the questions of whether we will be identical
with someone who exists in the future and of whether it matters. In other words,
what Priestley is saying here is that even if the resurrected person were not
strictly identical with the person on Earth, he would be close enough to being
identical so that the loss of strict identity would not matter. And in considering
whether strict identity does matter, he distinguished three ways in which it
might: first, people’s so-called self-interested concerns for their own futures;
second, societal concerns that the prospect of future rewards and punishments
motivate people to behave themselves; and, third, theological concerns about
the propriety of divine rewards and punishments. Thus, toward the end of the
eighteenth century and perhaps without inferring anything from fission

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examples, Priestley introduced and embraced one of the key ideas—that identity
is not primarily what matters in survival—that has been central to the revolution
in personal identity theory in our own times.

Following the publication of the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit,

in which Priestley put forth this interpretation of what matters in survival, he
engaged in a debate through correspondence with Richard Price, another
dissenting minister, and published this correspondence the following year
(Priestley and Price 1778). Price pressed Priestley on his knowledge of Clarke’s
views and explicitly asked him whether he has read Clarke’s debate with Collins.
Priestley answered that he has ‘carefully read all Dr. Clarke’s metaphysical
works’. Then, by discussing replication, Price pursued Priestley on Priestley’s
interpretation of the resurrection:

Suppose it [the soul] …to be merely the organization of the body;
would not the change in the matter of the body make another body?
And would not another body make another soul, though the same
organization should be preserved?… Would not, in short, any
number of living bodies be one soul, one sentient principle,
supposing their organization the same?

(Ibid.: 56–9, 77–8)

Priestley answered ‘that different systems of matter, organized exactly alike,
must make different beings, who would feel and think exactly alike in the
same circumstances. The bodies and minds of these beings would be exactly
similar, but numerically different’.

When Collins was asked a question by Clarke similar to the one Price asked

Priestley, he made the somewhat puzzling response that at the resurrection the
fissioned descendants of a common ancestor must all be one person since they
all would have the same consciousness. In contrast, Priestley answered that
duplicated persons must be different since they are composed of different matter,
which determines a numerical difference in identity, in spite of their having
similar consciousnesses. Although Price continued to ask questions about these
multiple men who have the same soul, Priestley declined to discuss it further,
saying: ‘I professedly argue on an hypothesis that is not my own, and submit
the force of the argument to the judgement of the reader’. Later, Priestley was
‘happy to concur’ with Price’s insistence that the same matter will make the
same person in the miracle of the resurrection (Ibid.: 108–9, 113, 120).

William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s first work, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, was published
in 1805, when he was 27 years old. It was the culmination of a kind of
perspective on personal identity that began with Locke, and then was developed
in various ways by Collins, Hume, Law, and Priestley. Yet, with respect to

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certain questions that would become important in our own times, Hazlitt reads
more like one of our own contemporaries than any of his predecessors. It is not
too much to say that had Hazlitt’s views on personal identity received the
attention they deserved, the philosophical discussion of personal identity may
well have leaped ahead 150 years and the psychological discussion been
significantly advanced.

Hazlitt’s views did not receive the attention they deserved. Far from it.

Keats’s idea of the ‘negative capability’ of the imagination was based on a
careful study of Hazlitt’s Essay, Coleridge mentioned the Essay in print, but
only once and briefly, and Mackintosh, in the seventh edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, remarked in a footnote to his discussion of Butler
that ‘the very able work’ done by Hazlitt in the Essay ‘contains original views’
on the nature and origin of ‘the private appetites’.

But few others, and no

mainstream philosophers, seem even to have noticed.

Discouraged, Hazlitt

turned from metaphysics to painting, politics, and aesthetic criticism.

Recently Hazlitt’s star has risen. During the last few decades his writings

have been reprinted, previously unpublished correspondence has been
published, and there have been several books written about him.

However, it

is as critic and stylist, not also as personal identity theorist, that his reputation
has grown. Most commentators on his thought have been reluctant even to
discuss the Essay in detail.

More importantly, no mainstream personal identity

theorist, so far as we know, has ever even mentioned, much less discussed, any
aspect of Hazlitt’s views on personal identity.

In sum, as personal identity

theorist, Hazlitt, like Vico before him, is a fascinating example of what is
sometimes dismissed as a romantic fiction: the original and penetrating thinker
whose insights and perspectives are so far ahead of his own times that they
drop through the cracks of history.

In the Essay, Hazlitt remarked:

There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him
what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and
hero – milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper
delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his
success…, as time passes… [such moments] still awaken the
consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the search of truth
and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men.

(Hazlitt 1805:133)

Hazlitt’s moment occurred in 1794. He was 16 years old. In that moment, he
thought he realized three things: that we are naturally connected to ourselves
in the past and present, but only imaginatively connected to ourselves in the
future; that with respect to the future, we are naturally no more self-interested
than other-interested; and that for each of us, our future selves should have the
same moral and prudential status as that of anyone else’s future self. Whether

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these realizations are genuine is, of course, debatable. Some today would say that
they are. What is not debatable is that when in his Essay on the Principles of Human
Action (1805) Hazlitt explained and defended them, he sketched theoretical
possibilities and drew explosive morals from them that would not again be considered
seriously until our own times.

Hazlitt wrote that he was led to his central realizations by wondering ‘whether it

could properly be said to be an act of virtue in anyone to sacrifice his own final
happiness to that of any other person or number of persons, if it were possible for the
one ever to be made the price of the other?’ The question arose for him as he was
reading, in d’Holbach’s System of Nature, a speech put into the mouth of a supposed
atheist at the Last Judgment. Suppose, Hazlitt wondered, I could save twenty other
persons by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘should I not
do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequence
to myself the Lord knows when?’ On behalf of common sense, Hazlitt answered his
own question:

However insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period,
yet when the time comes I shall feel differently about it. I shall then
judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is, truly and
certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall
bitterly regret my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational agent,
to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I shall
feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this
continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an
immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes
me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct.

Hazlitt was dissatisfied with this answer.

I cannot…have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the
immediate connection between my present and future self, for no such
connection exists or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My
feelings, actions, and interests must be determined by causes already
existing and acting, and are absolutely independent of the future.

(Ibid: 133–5)

Where there is no ‘intercommunity of feelings’, he claimed, ‘there can be no identity
of interests’ (Ibid: 139).

Hazlitt conceded that because we remember only our own past experiences and

are directly ‘conscious’ only of our own present experiences, in relation to the past
and present people are naturally self-interested.

[Any] absolute distinction which the mind feels in comparing itself
with others [is] confined to two faculties, viz., sensation, or rather

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consciousness, and memory. The operation of both these faculties
is of a perfectly exclusive and individual nature; and so far as their
operation extends (but no farther) is man a personal, or if you will,
a selfish being.

(Ibid: 110–11)

The reasons for this, Hazlitt insisted, are physiological. Memories depend on
physical traces of prior sensations, and these traces are not communicated
among individuals. Present sensations depend on the stimulation of one’s
nerves, and ‘there is no communication between my nerves, and another’s brain,
by means of which he can be affected with my sensations as I am myself’. In
the case of the future, however, Hazlitt stressed that people are neither
‘mechanically’ nor ‘exclusively’ connected to themselves. They cannot be, he
thought, since no one’s future yet exists. Instead, people are connected both to
their own futures and to the futures of others by means of their faculties of
anticipation. These, he claimed, unlike the faculties of memory and sensation,
are a function of imagination and, thus, do not respect the difference between
self and other:

[Imagination] must carry me out of myself into the feeling of others
by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it
were into my future being and interested in it. I could not love
myself, if I were not capable of loving others. Self-love, used in
this sense, is in its fundamental principle the same with disinterested
benevolence.

(Ibid: 3)

In other words, Hazlitt maintained that to feel future-oriented concern for
someone, one first must project oneself imaginatively into the feelings of that
person, and that imagination, functioning naturally, that is, independently of
its having acquired a bias through learning, projects as easily into the feelings
of others as into one’s own future feelings.

Hazlitt exaggerated the extent to which memory is independent of

imagination and underestimated our mechanical connections to our future
selves. Like everybody else in the eighteenth century, he thought of memory
along Lockean lines, as the replication in the present of a past experience,
coupled with the feeling that the experience replicated is of something that
happened in the past. Today we know better. Memory is not just personal
episodic memory, but comes in a variety of guises; and even ‘veridical’ episodic
memories are highly reconstructive, and thus importantly the product of
imaginative activity.

In addition, people may well be linked to their future

selves in ways that Hazlitt did not recognize. For instance, Hazlitt’s observation
that, in 1805, his causal links to his future self had not yet happened hardly
justifies his view that ‘I am what I am in spite of the future’. If, as many

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philosophers believe, selves or persons are four-dimensional objects, only one
stage of which exists in the present, then it cannot be true, in 1805, that Hazlitt
is what he is in spite of the future, that is, that he is what he is in spite of any
stages of himself that came into being after 1805. For both past and future
person stages of Hazlitt are none the less person-stages of Hazlitt for being
past and future.

The problem is that Hazlitt considered the future only from

the point of view of common sense, that is, from a perspective situated within
a temporal series in which ‘now’ is the current moment. From that common
sense point of view, causal links to our future selves have not yet happened.
However, from a timeless point of view, Hazlitt, in 1805, was causally linked
both to his past and to his future.

Even so, Hazlitt was right in insisting that at any given time there is a crucial

difference in our relations to our past and future selves. It is that we are already
affected by past stages of ourselves and not yet affected by future stages of
ourselves. Hence, at any given time, our imaginations play a greater role in
linking current to future stages of ourselves, than they do in linking current to
past stages of ourselves. Hence, even though present stages of ourselves will
connect mechanically to future stages of ourselves and, from a timeless point
of view, are ‘already’ connected, we are not yet affected by those connections
to the future, as we are connected via memory to the past. Hence, for the time
being, we have to rely almost exclusively on imagination to connect
psychologically to our future selves.

Thus, while Hazlitt may have been wrong in regard to the causal and

metaphysical dimensions of his pivotal assertion that he is what he is in spite
of the future, he was right that to connect psychologically with our future selves,
we have to rely on our imaginations in ways, and to a degree, that we do not
have to rely on our imaginations to connect with our current and past selves.
He may also have been right in insisting that so far as our values are concerned,
past, present, and future do not have the same status or, if they do, that they
come to have it in different ways. And he saw that to understand what these
different ways are, one must investigate two issues that none of his predecessors
had addressed adequately: one is the role of the imagination in connecting us
to the future generally and, in particular, to ourselves in the future; the other is
the role of self-conceptions, in possibly masking from ourselves, in connection
with self-interest, salient differences between past, present, and future.

It was in Hazlitt’s account of the role of self-conceptions in our values and

in our views of our own interests that he contrasts most sharply with the
eighteenth century tradition of which he was the culmination. According to
Hazlitt, people are naturally concerned about whether someone is pleased or
suffers as a consequence of their actions. This is because ‘there is something
in the very idea of good, or evil, which naturally excites desire or aversion’.
But, he claimed, before the acquisition of self-concepts, people are indifferent
about whether those who may be pleased or suffer are themselves or others: ‘a
child first distinctly wills or pursues his own good…not because it is his but

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because it is good’. As a consequence, he claimed, ‘what is personal or selfish
in our affections’ is due to ‘time and habit’, the rest to ‘the principle of a
disinterested love of good as such, or for it’s own sake, without any regard to
personal distinctions’ (Ibid: 33–4). He thought that such thoughts provided a
basis for founding morality not on self-interest, which he regarded as an
‘artificial’ value, but on the natural concern people have to seek happiness and
avoid unhappiness, regardless of whose it is. He concluded triumphantly that
‘we are not obliged at last to establish generosity and virtue “lean pensioners”
on self-interest’ (Ibid: 48–9).

More important than such possible ethical implications, a consequence of

Hazlitt’s emphasizing the thesis that people are mechanically related to their
own presents and pasts, but only imaginatively related to their futures, and that
the ‘natural’ uses to which they put their imaginations do not respect the
difference between self and other, led him to ask a question which did not arise
as starkly or in the same form for any of his predecessors. The question was: if
people connect to the future through imagination, which does not respect the
difference between self and other, why is the force of habit almost invariably
on the side of selfish feelings? His answer involved his trying to account for
the growth of selfish motives in humans by appeal to their acquisition of self-
concepts. In his view, when very young children behave selfishly it is not
because they like themselves better, but because they know their own wants
and pleasures better. In older children and adults, he thought, it is because they
have come under the control of their self-concepts, which is something that
happens in three stages. First, young children acquire an idea of themselves as
beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. Second, and almost
‘mechanically’ (since physiology insures that children remember only their
own pasts), children include their own pasts in their notions of themselves.
Finally, imaginatively, they include their own futures (Ibid: 34–5). The first
two of these stages may have been suggested to Hazlitt by his reading of Locke.
The third is original. However, even in the case of the first two, Hazlitt thought
of them less as a philosopher and more as a psychologist might think of them,
in terms of the acquisition of self-concepts, and whereas it was unclear whether
Locke meant to distinguish developmental stages in the acquisition of self-
concepts, Hazlitt clearly wanted to do so.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the developmental psychological

hypotheses that Locke saw dimly were invisible to most of his readers. As
commonsensical as the idea of psychological development may seem to us
today, it did not come into focus in the views of eighteenth century thinkers
until mid-century. Hartley had a developmental, associational account of the
mind, but he focussed on the development of the passions and never considered
the acquisition of self-concepts.

Rousseau, in Emile, showed deep sensitivity

to developmental concerns, but not particularly with respect to the acquisition
of self-concepts. Reid, late in the century, had a developmental psychology,
but because of his commitment to the immateriality of the soul and the reflexive

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nature of consciousness, he may actually have made an exception in the case
of the idea of self. And Priestley, largely under the influence of Hartley, did
think that his own developmental account could be extended to the acquisition
of self-concepts, but neither stressed nor elabor-ated the point. Hazlitt did both.

Hazlitt thought that to progress through all three of the development stages

that he distinguished in the acquisition of self-concepts, a child has to
differentiate its own mental activities from those of others. In his view, this
involves ‘perceiving that you are and what you are from the immediate reflection
of the mind on its own operations, sensations or ideas’.

It is by comparing the knowledge that I have of my own impressions,
ideas, feelings, powers, etc. with my knowledge of the same or
similar impressions, ideas, etc. in others, and with the still more
imperfect conception that I form of what passes in their minds when
this is supposed to be essentially different from what passes in my
own, that I acquire the general notion of self. If I had no idea of
what passes in the minds of others, or if my ideas of their feelings
and perceptions were perfect representations, i.e., mere conscious
repetitions of them, all proper personal distinction would be lost
either in pure self-love, or in perfect universal sympathy.

(Ibid: 105–8)

Hazlitt here raised the question of how a child’s formation of self-concepts is
related to its development of empathy and sympathy. So far as we know, no
one previously had ever asked this question. As we shall see, currently
developmental psychologists are preoccupied with it.

Hazlitt’s genetic approach is a real advance beyond the approaches of earlier

theorists, especially those who wrote in the first half of the eighteenth century.
For instance, in Hume’s emotional contagion model of human sympathy,
humans infer from external behavior, facial expressions, and the like that others
are in some particular mental state. Then, the resulting idea that humans form
of another’s state becomes converted in their own minds into an impression, so
that now they too are in the same state, though perhaps less vivaciously. In
explaining how the conversion from idea to impression occurs, Hume appealed
to the idea’s ‘proximity’ in one’s mind to the impression one has of oneself,
which he said is ‘so lively’ that ‘it is not possible to imagine that any thing can
in this particular go beyond it’. But, then he added not a word of explanation
about how people acquire their super-lively self-impressions.

Hazlitt’s approach is also more advanced than those who wrote much later

in the eighteenth century. Smith, for instance, gave an unusually thorough
account of the role, in sympathy, of shifts from one’s own to another’s point of
view. Yet he never attempted to explain how people acquire their ideas of the
distinction between self and other. Aside from the applications of his ideas to
ethical theory, his gaze was fixed on the importance of point of view as a feature

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of our already formed adult minds, not on the psychogenetics of point of view
in our mental development. The closest he came to discussing the mentality of
children was in his explanations of how adults sympathize with ‘poor wretches’,
children and the dead. As we have seen, in his view, in so sympathizing, adults
do not simply replicate the other’s state of mind in their own minds but, rather,
imagine what they themselves would feel if they were reduced to the other’s
situation, but somehow, per impossible, were allowed to keep their own current
reason and judgment. But while Smith was preoccupied with explaining how
sympathy is possible, it did not occur to him to explain how the mental concepts
that make it possible came to be acquired in the first place. In contrast, Hazlitt’s
approach is psychogenetic.

Hazlitt also wondered why young children imaginatively include only their

own futures and not the futures of others in their ideas of self. He hypothe-
sized that it is the ‘greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my
future feelings, that in a manner identifies them with my present being’. He
added that once the notion of one’s own personal identity is formed, ‘the mind
makes use of it to strengthen its habitual propensity, by giving to personal
motives a reality and absolute truth which they can never have’ (Ibid: 140).
This happens, he thought, because ‘we have an indistinct idea of extended
consciousness and a community of feelings as essential to the same thinking
being’. As a consequence, he said, we assume that whatever ‘interests [us] at
one time must interest [us] or be capable of interesting [us] at other times’
(Ibid: 10–11).

Hazlitt claimed that a bias in favour of ourselves in the future could never

‘have gained the assent of thinking men’ but for ‘the force’ with which a future-
oriented idea of self ‘habitually clings to the mind of every man, binding it as
with a spell, deadening its discriminating powers, and spreading the confused
associations which belong only to past and present impressions over the whole
of our imaginary existence’. However, whereas a host of previous thinkers,
such as Descartes, Locke, Clarke, Berkeley, and Butler, thought that people
have intuitive knowledge of their own identities, Hazlitt rejected as ‘wild and
absurd’ the idea that we have an ‘absolute, metaphysical identity’ with ourselves
in the future, and hence that people have identities that are available to be
intuited.

We have been misled, Hazlitt thought, by language: by ‘a mere play of

words’. In his view, both children and adults fail to look beyond the common
idioms of personal identity and as a consequence routinely mistake linguistic
fictions for metaphysical realities. To say that someone has a ‘general interest’
in whatever concerns her own future welfare ‘is no more’, he insisted, ‘than
affirming that [she] shall have an interest in that welfare, or that [she is]
nominally and in certain other respects the same being who will hereafter have
a real interest in it’. No amount of mere telling ‘me that I have the same interest
in my future sensations as if they were present, because I am the same
individual’, he claimed, can bridge the gulf between the ‘real’ mechanical

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connections I have to myself in the past and present and the merely verbal and
imaginary connections that I have to myself in the future (Ibid: 6, 10–11, 27–9).

Assuming that people have no mechanical connections to themselves in the

future, it follows, Hazlitt thought, that so far as peoples’ ‘real’ interests are
concerned, their ‘selves’ in the future are essentially others. So, for instance, if
you have injured yourself, you may in the present suffer as a consequence. But
‘the injury that I may do to my future interest will not certainly by any kind of
reaction return to punish me for my neglect of my own happiness’. Rather, Hazlitt
concluded, ‘I am always free from the consequences of my actions. The interests
of the being who acts, and of the being who suffers are never one’. So, it makes
no difference ‘whether [you] pursue [your] own welfare or entirely neglect it’
(Ibid: 31). Your suffering in the future is only nominally your suffering.

In sum, Hazlitt gave a psychological account of how people come to identify

with their future selves, from which he drew a metaphysical conclusion: that
peoples’ seeming identities with their future selves are illusions. He then used
this metaphysical conclusion as the basis for an inference to a normative
conclusion: that we have no self-interested reason to be concerned about the fate
of our future selves. Whether or not Hazlitt’s conclusions are correct, both of his
inferences are fallacious. Psychology, all by itself, does not have such implications
for metaphysics, and metaphysics, all by itself, does not have such implications
for ethics. Nevertheless, Hazlitt asked questions, perhaps for the first time, that
deeply interest theorists in our own times.

Hazlitt’s consideration of fission examples occurred in the context of his

critique of the Lockean idea that one’s identity extends as far as one’s
consciousness extends. What, Hazlitt asked, would a theorist committed to this
idea say ‘if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being?’ How
would such a person know that he or she had not been ‘imposed upon by a false
claim of identity?’ He answered, on behalf of the Lockeans, that the idea of
one’s consciousness extending to someone else ‘is ridiculous’: a person has ‘no
other self than that which arises from this very consciousness’. But, he countered,
after our deaths:

this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity
may think proper to endue with the same consciousness; which if it
can be so renewed at will in any one instance, may clearly be so in a
hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I
equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of
them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to
be determined in my choice? Here, then, I saw an end put to my
speculations about absolute self-interest and personal identity.

(Ibid: 135–6)

Thus, Hazlitt saw that, hypothetically, psychological continuity might not
continue in a single stream but instead might divide.

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In asking the two questions: ‘Am I to regard all of these [fission descendants]

as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all [of these fission
descendants]?’, Hazlitt correctly separated the question of whether identity
tracks psychological continuity from that of whether self-concern tracks it.
And, in direct anticipation of what would not occur again to other philosophers
until the 1960s, he concluded that because of the possibility of fission neither
identity nor self-concern necessarily tracks psychological continuity. Thus, he
used his theological speculations in the same spirit, and to the same effect, as
philosophers in our own times have used science-fiction scenarios.

Hazlitt also used fission examples to call into question whether in cases in

which there is no fission, a person’s present self-interest extends to his or her
self in the future. He began by asking:

How then can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only
reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with
the future that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be
continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by or renewed in
me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how
many different beings and prolonged by complicated sufferings
without my being any the wiser for it, how I say can a principle of
this sort identify my present with my future interests, and make me
as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were
actually impressed on my senses?

Hazlitt’s answer was that it cannot.

It is plain, as this conscious being may be decompounded, entirely
destroyed, renewed again, or multiplied in a great number of beings,
and as, whichever of these takes place, it cannot produce the least
alteration in my present being—that what I am does not depend on
what I am to be, and that there is no communication between my
future interests and the motives by which my present conduct must
be governed.

He concluded:

I cannot, therefore, have a principle of active self-interest arising
out of the immediate connection between my present and future
self, for no such connection exists, or is possible…. My personal
interest in any thing must refer either to the interest excited by the
actual impression of the object which cannot be felt before it exists,
and can last no longer than while the impression lasts, or it may
refer to the particular manner in which I am mechanically affected
by the idea of my own impressions in the absence of the object. I

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can therefore have no proper personal interest in my future
impressions… The only reason for my preferring my future interest
to that of others, must arise from my anticipating it with greater
warmth of present imagination.

(Ibid: 138–40)

With the exception of F.H.Bradley, such ideas would not be taken seriously

again until the 1960s.

149

FUTURE OF THE SELF

We shall briefly summarize chapters one to five. In the late seventeenth century,
virtually all philosophers subscribed to a basically Platonic conception of self.
The times were ripe for that conception to be challenged. Earlier, Hobbes and
Spinoza had challenged it, but not effectively. So, the task was left to Locke,
who played his part as challenger remarkably effectively. Yet from the point
of view of contributing to an empirical science of the self, Locke retained
some old-fashioned commitments that became obstacles. One was to the idea
that each of us has an intuitive knowledge of his own existence, which for
Locke meant his own existence as a self. A second was to the reflexive nature
of consciousness, according to which necessarily if someone is conscious of
anything, then that person is also conscious that he is conscious. And, a third—
about which Locke seems to have wavered—was to a static, rather than
developmental, account of the acquisition of self-concepts.

Because of the first two of these commitments, Locke’s critics were able to

refute the simple memory-view of personal identity that they attributed to
him, and as a consequence ignore his intimations about mental development.
They were also able to ignore the closely related idea that the self is a fictional
construct, or more accurately they were able to wave it in Locke’s face as an
objection to his view. So, for instance, both Clarke and Butler protested that if
Locke’s view were true, then since the self would be a fiction people would
have no reason to value their future selves. With the sole exception of Hume
(some of the time), and to a lesser degree of Law, no one was willing to embrace
this seeming-consequence of Locke’s view. And Hume’s endorsement of the
idea that the self is a fiction was against the backdrop of his global skepticism
in Book 1 of the Treatise, according to which the whole world is a fiction.

By mid-century the empirical science of human nature was being born.

Skepticism could easily be set aside because it does not give rise to a
meaningful strategy for empirical research. Perhaps partly for this reason,
Hume’s Treatise, by his own admission, ‘fell still born from the press’. Yet,
primarily in the second book of the Treatise, Hume had views which, from the
point of view of a nascent science of psychology, were more progressive. But
he never explained the relationship between his earlier skepticism and these

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more scientifically progressive ideas, probably because he did not understand
the relationship himself. His reticence on this issue was especially glaring in
his account of the self. After roundly denouncing in Book 1 of the Treatise the
idea that we have an impression of a ‘simple and continu’d’ self, in Book 2
Hume declared that we not only have some sort of impression of self but one
that is more vivid and constant than any other impression we have.

Although there are intimations in Priestley of how, without rejecting the main

impetus in Locke’s account, one could get beyond its limitations in developing
a modern account of the self, it was left to Hazlitt to bring it all together. Hazlitt
rejected Locke’s idea that each of us has an intuitive knowledge of our own
existence as a self, as well as Locke’s commitment to the reflexive nature of
consciousness. Instead of these, Hazlitt embraced the idea, as had Hume, that
the self is a fictional construct. But, good student of Priestley that he was, Hazlitt
embraced this idea within the context of a materialistic and realistic view of the
world. So, animated as Hazlitt was by ethical concerns, rather than departing
altogether from the topic of self under the cloak of skepticism, he advanced the
idea, which was latent in Locke and some subsequent thinkers, that people
acquire their conceptions of their own selves and those of others in developmental
stages. Hazlitt then not only conceded but embraced and celebrated the idea
that the self is a fictional construct, since, in his view, it had the further implication
that people have no special (‘self-interested’) reason to value their future selves.
At least to his own satisfaction, and in a way that clearly anticipated the work of
Derek Parfit and others in our own times, Hazlitt tried to explain how the idea
that the self is a fiction, far from being destructive to theories of rationality and
ethics, actually made them better. In the process, he sowed the seeds, albeit on
barren ground, of a modern psychology of the acquisition of self-concepts.

Thus, ends the story that we intended to tell in the present book. Hazlitt is

the last progressive figure in a more or less continuous tradition of discussion
of the nature of self and personal identity that began with Locke and that took
place in Britain throughout the eighteenth century. Several things broke up the
continuity of this tradition. One of the major things, which we have already
begun to discuss, was the increasing separation of philosophy and psychology,
each of which throughout the nineteenth and increasingly into the twentieth
centuries have tended to go their separate ways. Another, which only began to
be felt seriously in Britain in the nineteenth century, was the influence of Kant.
Nevertheless, the ideas that animated the eighteenth century British debate over
self and personal identity have continued to be discussed and have even enjoyed
a remarkable rebirth in our own times, both in philosophy and in psychology.

Nineteenth-century philosophy of personal identity

As we have seen, by the end of the eighteenth century, discussion of fission
examples in connection with personal identity theory, as well as consideration
of the thesis that personal identity is not what matters primarily in survival,

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had been introduced into debate. And toward the beginning of the nineteenth
century both issues were developed progressively in the writings of Hazlitt.
In short, early in the nineteenth century, the debate over personal identity was
proceeding along a trajectory that will seem quite up to date to students of
contemporary analytic personal identity theory. However, after Hazlitt the
consideration of personal identity took a turn for the worse in Britain. Part of
the reason for this is that major theorists, such as Thomas Brown, James Mill,
and John Stuart Mill, looked back over the heads of Priestley and Hazlitt
primarily to Hume, whose merits, whatever else they may have been, did not
include advancing discussion of the forward-looking ideas that came to fruition
only late in the century. Another part of the reason is that Kant, whose enormous
influence took a while to reach Britain but then through the subsequent rise of
idealism for nearly a century all but obliterated the sort of empirically based
speculation over personal identity that had dominated eighteenth-century
British philosophy, took the discussion of self and unity of consciousness
into a different direction. As a consequence, a great deal that was progressive
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries discussion of self and personal
identity dropped from sight, including many of the major themes debated by
Clarke and Collins, the surprisingly modern views of Priestley and Hazlitt,
and even the basic idea that fission examples are important to theories of
personal identity.

In the eighteenth century, fission examples had been mentioned, albeit

casually and ambiguously, in Locke and Reid, who continued to be read
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But neither Locke nor Reid
had made the importance of fission examples to personal identity theory clear.
Yet, even without the prod of fission examples, although perhaps not as
dramatically, many of the same questions regarding the importance of personal
identity that concerned Priestley and Hazlitt could have been provoked merely
by attending to the view that personal identity consists not in the persistence
of a substance but in relations among earlier and later persons (or person-
stages). But, ironically, in those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traditions
that eventually evolved into analytic philosophy, there was not that much
sympathy for a relational view of personal identity. Instead, the substance
view, boosted in part by the way in which nineteenth-century thinkers
interpreted Kant’s transcendental philosophy, had a long, lingering demise.

Wherever the influence of the substance view was still felt, it tended to

terminate reflection on the importance of identity. Although both of the Mills
had a relational view of the self, substance views remained viable even among
influential, empirically minded thinkers. For instance, in a passage reminiscent
of Hazlitt and one that may have influenced Parfit, Henry Sidgwick mused,
‘It must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist, “Why should I sacrifice a
present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself
about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other
persons?”’ He persisted: ‘Grant that the Ego is merely a system of coherent

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phenomena, that the permanent identical “I” is not a fact but a fiction, as
Hume and his followers maintain; why, then, should one part of the series of
feelings into which the Ego is resolved be concerned with another part of
the same series, any more than with any other series?’ (Sidgwick 1874:418).
Sidgwick’s question is one that Priestley answered and that Hazlitt, although
he was no doubt aware of Priestley’s answer, asked again and answered
somewhat differently. However, Sidgwick, without the prod of fission
examples and with substance accounts of identity still a respectable option,
managed to set this question aside.

Even though in the last half of the nineteenth century, substance views

still dominated the discussion of self and personal identity, there was one
out-standing exception. F.H.Bradley had thoughts about the self that were
remarkably like those of Law and Priestley, though without their commitment
to materialism. Bradley claimed that personal identity is conventional, that
it is best regarded as a matter of degree, and that how we think of it should
be determined pragmatically, in ways that permit us to think of it differently
for different purposes. He even used fission examples to criticize Locke’s
simple memory view of personal identity:

If the self remembers because and according as it is now, might
not another self be made of a quality the same and hence
possessing the same past in present recollection? And if one could
be made thus, why not also two or three? These might be made
distinct at the present time, through their differing quality, and
again through outward relations, and yet be like enough for each
to remember the same past, and so, of course to be the same.

(Bradley 1893:72)

Bradley concluded from this example ‘that a self is not thought to be the
same because of bare memory, but only so when that memory is considered
not to be deceptive’. He then claimed that it follows from this requirement
that:

Identity must depend in the end upon past experience, and not
solely upon mere present thinking. And continuity in some degree,
and in some unintelligible sense, is by the popular view required
for personal identity. He who is risen from the dead may really
be the same, though we can say nothing intelligible of his
ambiguous eclipse or his phase of half-existence. But a man
wholly like the first, but created fresh after the same lapse of
time, we might feel was too much to be one, if not quite enough
to be two. Thus it is evident that, for personal identity, some
continuity is requisite, but how much no one seems to know.

(Ibid.: 73)

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Bradley concluded: ‘If we are not satisfied with vague phrases and
meaningless generalities, we soon discover that the best way is not to ask
questions’.

But what if we do persist in asking questions? Then, Bradley said, we will

be left with this result:

Personal identity is mainly a matter of degree. The question has a
meaning if confined to certain aspects of the self, though even
here it can be made definite in each case only by the arbitrary
selection of points of view. And in each case there will be a limit
fixed in the end by no clear principle. But in what the general
sameness of one self consists is a problem insoluble because it is
meaningless. This question, I repeat it, is sheer nonsense until we
have got some clear idea as to what the self is to stand for. If you
ask me whether a man is identical in this or that respect, and for
one purpose or another purpose, then, if we do not understand one
another, we are on the road to an understanding. In my opinion,
even then we shall reach our end only by more or less of convention
and arrangement. But to seek an answer in general to the question
asked at large is to pursue a chimera.

(Ibid.)

After beginning like Clarke in his criticism of Locke’s simple memory view,
but without the immaterial soul hypothesis to fall back on, Bradley ended
with a view something like that of Law or Priestley.

Elsewhere, Bradley, with fission examples still on his mind, even considered

the possibility, for which Priestley had actually argued, of accounting for the
resurrection on materialist grounds:

After an interval, no matter how long, another nervous system
sufficiently like our own might be developed; and in this case
memory and a personal identity must arise. The event may be as
improbable as you please, but I at least can find no reason for
calling it impossible. And we may even go a step further still. It is
conceivable that an indefinite number of such bodies should exist,
not in succession merely, but all together and all at once. But, if
so, we might gain a personal continuance not single but multiform,
and might secure a destiny on which it would be idle to enlarge.

(Ibid.: 445)

In sum, Bradley was a conventionalist about personal identity.

Among those who still believed in the reality of personal identity, it was

not until the first quarter of the twentieth century that substance views were
finally given the ax, on one side, by the positivists and, on the other, by the

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phenomenologists, particularly Heidegger, who had moved on to a social
conception of the self. In the twentieth century, it is only in analytic philosophy
that anything like a Lockean, atomistic, relational view has persisted. And in
the analytic tradition, until the 1970s, no one again asked the sorts of questions
that Priestley and Hazlitt had asked and that have become such a mainstay of
late twentieth century analytic personal identity debates.

Contemporary philosophy of personal identity

In the late twentieth century, there have been three major developments in
analytic personal identity theory: the intrinsic relations view of personal
identity has been largely superseded by the extrinsic relations view (which is
also sometimes called the closest-continuer view and the externalist view);
the question of what matters in survival has returned to the forefront of
theorist’s concerns; and four-dimensional views of persons have challenged
the traditional three-dimensional view.

According to the older intrinsic relations view, what determines whether a

person at different times is identical is just how the two are physically and/or
psychologically related to each other. According to more recent extrinsic
relations views, what determines whether a person at different times is identical
is not just how the two are physically and/or psychologically related to each
other but also how they are related to others. For instance, in Locke’s simple
memory-version of the intrinsic relations view, you right now are the same
person as someone who existed yesterday if you remember having experienced
or having done things which that person of yesterday experienced or did. In
an extrinsic relations version of Locke’s simple memory-view, one would have
to take into account not only whether you remember having experienced or
having done things which that person of yesterday experienced or did, but
also whether, in addition to you, anyone else remembers having experienced
or done things which that person of yesterday experienced or did.

Fission examples are largely responsible for the recent move from an

intrinsic to an extrinsic relations view. In the sort of fission examples that
have been most discussed since the late 1960s, a person somehow divides into
two (seemingly) numerically different persons, each of whom, initially, is
qualitatively identical to the other and also to the pre-fission person from
whom they both descended. For example, imagine that all information in human
brains is encoded redundantly so that it is possible to separate a human’s
brain into two parts, leaving each half-brain fully functioning and encoded
with all it needs to sustain the original person’s full mental life just as (except
for the elimination of underlying redundancy) his whole brain would have
sustained it had his whole brain never been divided. Now suppose that in
some normal, healthy human we perform a brain separation operation,
removing the two fully functioning half-brains from his body, which is then
immediately destroyed. Suppose, further, that we immediately implant each

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of these half-brains into its own, brainless body, which, except for being
brainless, is otherwise qualitatively identical to the original person’s body, so
that two people simultaneously emerge, each of whom, except for having only
half a brain, is qualitatively identical—physically and psychologically—to
the original person whose brain was divided and removed and, of course, to
each other.

Are these two fission-descendants the same person as each other? On an

intrinsic view of personal identity, such as Locke’s, they would be. Each would
remember having experienced things and having performed actions that the
original person experienced and performed. If, in deciding whether a person
at one time and one at another are the same person, we have to consider only
the relations between the person(s) at these two times, then it would seem that
the pre-fission person might be related to each of the post-fission persons so
as to have all that is required to preserve identity. But, the problem with
supposing that we have to consider only the relations between the pre-fission
person and a post-fission person is that another qualitatively identical post-
fission person has an equal claim to be the original person.

Many contemporary philosophers believe that, in a fission scenario like

the one just sketched, the pre-fission person—the brain donor—would cease.
We shall review their reasons for thinking this shortly. In the view of these
philosophers, it is more plausible to regard the pre-fission person and each of
the fission-descendants as three separate persons. Philosophers who think this
way accept an extrinsic relations view of personal identity, according to which
what determines whether a person at one time and one at another are the same
person is not only how the two are physically and/or psychologically related
to each other (which is all that would need to be considered on an intrinsic
relations view) but also how the two are related to others (in the case of our
example, especially the other fission-descendant).

The fission examples that eighteenth-century philosophers considered were

religion-fiction scenarios. The ones that contemporary philosophers have
considered tend to be science-fiction scenarios. Both sorts of fission examples
raise essentially the same issues for personal identity theory. In the eighteenth
century, many philosophers supposed—rightly or wrongly—that the religion-
fiction fission examples had a counterpart in real, albeit post-mortem,
developments. In our own times the science-fiction examples have a counter-
part in this-worldly real life.

In the late 1930s, neurosurgeons in the United States began performing an

operation in which they severed the corpus callosums of severe epileptics in the
hope of confining their seizures to one hemisphere of their brains, and thus
reducing their severity. To the surgeons’ initial surprise, the procedure was doubly
successful. Often it reduced not only the severity of the seizures, but also their
frequency. It also had a truly bizarre side-effect, not discovered until many years
later: It created two independent centers of consciousness within the same human
skull. These centres of consciousness lacked introspective access to each other

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and could be made to acquire and express information independently of each
other. Most dramatically, they sometimes differed volitionally, expressing their
differences using alternate sides of the same human bodies that they jointly
shared. In one case, for instance, a man who had had this operation reportedly
hugged his wife with one arm while he pushed her away with the other; in
another, a man tried with his right hand (controlled by his left, verbal hemisphere)
to hold a newspaper where he could read it, thereby blocking his view of the
TV, while he tried with his left hand (controlled by his right non-verbal
hemisphere) to knock the paper out of the way.

Since 1970 there has been a second major development in personal identity

theory. Philosophers have begun again to question whether personal identity is
primarily what matters in survival; that is, they have faced the possibility that
people might cease and be continued by others whose existences they would
value as much as their own existence and in pretty much the same ways as they
value their own existence. For the most part, they have revived this issue through
the consideration of science-fiction examples of brain splitting and
transplantation inspired by the real life cases just discussed. To see how such
examples call into question the importance of identity, imagine, for instance,
that you have a health problem that will result soon in your sudden and painless
death unless you receive one or the other of two available treatments. The first
is to have your brain removed and placed into the empty cranium of a body that,
except for being brainless, is qualitatively identical to your own. The second is
to have your brain removed, divided into functionally identical halves (each
capable of sustaining your full psychology), and then to have each of these
halves put into the empty cranium of a body of its own, again one that is brainless
but otherwise qualitatively identical to your own.

Suppose that in the first treatment there is a 10 per cent chance that the

transplantation will take and that if it takes, the survivor who wakes up in the
recovery room will be physically and psychologically like you just prior to the
operation except that he will know he has had the operation and will be healthy.
In the second there is a 95 percent chance both transplantations will take. If
both take, each of the survivors who wakes up in the recovery room will be
physically and psychologically like you just prior to the operation except that
each of them will know he has had the operation and each will be healthy. If the
transplantation in the first treatment does not take, the would-be survivor will
die painlessly on the operating table. If either transplantation in the second
treatment does not take, the other will not take either, and both would-be
survivors will die painlessly on the operating table. Suppose everything else
about the treatments is the same and as attractive to you as possible: for instance,
both treatments are painless, free of charge, and, if successful, result in survivors
who recover quickly.

As we have seen, many philosophers believe that in the first (non-fission)

treatment, you would continue, but in the second (fission) treatment, you would
cease and be replaced by others. They think that in the second treatment you

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would cease and be replaced because they believe, first, that identity is a
transitive relationship, second, that the survivors, at least once they began to
lead independent lives, are not plausibly regarded as the same people as each
other and, third, that it would be arbitrary to regard just one of the survivors
but not the other as you. Hence, in the view of these philosophers, it is more
plausible to regard each of the survivors as a different person from each other
and from you.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that this way of viewing what will happen

in the two treatments is correct. Then, you would persist through the first
treatment but in the second you would cease and be replaced by others. So,
only by sacrificing your identity could you greatly increase the chances of
someone’s emerging from the operation and surviving for years who initially
would be qualitatively just like you. The question is whether, in the
circumstances specified, it would be worth it for you to have such an operation,
that is, whether only from a point of view of what in more normal circumstances
would be considered as a totally selfish (or self-regarding), it would be worth
it. Many who consider examples like this one feel strongly that it would be
worth it. So, for them, at least, it would seem that ceasing and being continued
by others can matter as much, or almost as much, as persisting, and in pretty
much the same ways. But if ceasing and being continued by others can matter
as much (and in the same ways) as persisting, then identity is not what matters
primarily in survival. Among philosophers who have felt this way, Derek
Parfit’s views have perhaps been more influential than anyone else’s.

Parfit has a neo-Lockean view of personal identity, but one according to

which what binds the different stages of persons is not just memory, but mental
relations more generally (anticipations, beliefs, intentions, character traits,
and so on). In Parfit’s view, unlike in Locke’s, it is not necessary for each
stage of us to be directly related to every other stage. Rather, it is enough if
each stage is indirectly related through intermediate stages. Thus, Parfit’s view
in not vulnerable to the Grove—Berkeley—Reid objection to Locke’s view.
In Parfit’s view, if C at t

is directly psychologically connected to B at t

, but

not to A at t

, but B at t

is directly psychologically connected to A at t

, then C

at t

, is indirectly psychologically connected to A at t

; that may be enough to

preserve personal identity. In sum, in Parfit’s view, what binds us over time
are psychological connections, overlapping ‘like the strands in a rope’ (Parfit
1984:222).

So as to avoid the charge that his analysis of personal identity is circular,

Parfit has responded to those who think that the notion of same person enters
into the proper analysis of various psychological relations, but particularly of
memory, by formulating his analyses of these psychological relations in terms
of specially defined ‘q-senses’ of them. These specially defined ‘q-senses’,
by definition, do not include the notion of same person. For instance, he has
defined a notion of quasi-memory (or, q-memory), which is just like that of
memory, except that whereas the claim someone remembers having experienced

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something may imply that the person remembers that they themselves
experienced that thing, the claim that someone q-remembers having
experiencing something implies—by definition—only that the person
remembers that someone experienced that thing. Thus, Parfit’s view in not
vulnerable to the argument Butler and others used to try to show that Locke’s
view is circular.

To illustrate how q-memory might work, Parfit gave as an example Jane’s

seeming to remember Paul’s experience, in Venice, of looking across water
and seeing a lightening bolt fork and then strike two objects (Ibid.: 220).
Parfit claimed that in seeming to remember this experience Jane might have
known that she was seeming to remember an experience that Paul (and not
she) had had originally, and that if Jane had known this, then she would have
known, from the inside, part of what it was like to be Paul on that day in
Venice. In other words, Jane would have known she was seeming to remember
Paul’s experience from the same sort of subjective, first-person point of view
from which Paul actually had the experience originally and from which
ordinarily Jane actually remembers only her own experiences. If one
acknowledges that Parfit’s hypothetical example is at least theoretically
possible, as it seems we should (imagine, say, that part of Paul’s brain had
been surgically implanted into Jane’s brain), then apparently it is possible, in
analyses of personal identity, to substitute q-memory for memory and thereby
avoid Butler’s objection. In other words, even if simple memory analyses of
personal identity are circular, it would not follow that q-memory analyses of
personal identity are circular.

In 1694, when Locke proposed his same-consciousness view, most

philosophers subscribed to a soul view. In 1984, when Parfit proposed the
fullest version of his theory, probably most philosophers subscribed to the
view that the continuity of our bodies, or of some part of our bodies, is
necessary for personal persistence. Parfit, by contrast, denied that bodily
continuity is necessary for personal persistence. To support this denial, he
supposed, first, that while someone’s brain is healthy, his body is ridden with
cancer and his only hope for survival is to have his entire healthy brain
transplanted intact to another healthy body. He supposed also that this
procedure is perfectly safe and that the body into which the donor’s brain will
be transplanted is better than his current body, not only in that it is healthy but
also in other respects that appeal to the donor. Parfit pointed out, surely
correctly, that the donor has not lost much if he jettisons his old body and
moves his brain to the better body that awaits it. Such an operation would not
be as bad as staying in the old body and dying of cancer, even if the death
were painless. In fact, vanity being what it is, if radical cosmetic surgery of
this sort were available and safe, it is likely that many people would choose it,
even if the old bodies they jettisoned were healthy. So, if physical continuity
matters, Parfit concluded, it cannot be the continuity of the whole body but at
most the continuity of the brain.

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Parfit argued that the importance of our brains, like that of our other organs,

is not intrinsic but derivative; that is, the brain’s importance depends solely
on the functions it serves. So, if half of our brains were functionally equivalent
to the whole, for most of us the preservation of our whole brain would not
matter much, and, it would seem, the continuity even of any part of the brain
is not necessarily important. If some other organ, such as the liver, sustained
our psychologies and our brains served the functions that this other organ
now serves, then this other organ would be as important in survival as the
brain now is and the brain only as important as this other organ now is. So, it
would seem that if something else—anything else—could sustain our
psychologies as reliably as the brain, then the brain (i.e, the physical organ
that actually now functions as the brain) would have little importance in
survival, even if this other thing were not any part of our bodies (Ibid.: 284–
5).

A critic might object that even though the importance of an organ is

derivative and based solely on its being the vehicle for preserving a person’s
psychology, given that it has always been that vehicle, then the preservation
of that organ may matter importantly, even primarily, in survival. In other
words, it is possible that even though something else might have assumed that
organ’s function of preserving a person’s psychology and, hence, that under
those imagined circumstances the organ that now serves that function would
not have mattered importantly in survival, once an organ actually has served
the function of preserving a person’s psychology, then it may matter
importantly in survival. But probably for most of us, the very organ that has
actually sustained our psychologies, merely in virtue of its having sustained
our psychologies, would not thereby matter all that importantly to us in survival.

Imagine, for instance, that competent doctors discover that you have both

a brain disease and a brain abnormality. The disease has not impaired the
functioning of your brain yet. But if it is untreated, it will result in your death
in the near future. Because of the abnormality, there is a simple, effective, and
painless cure. The abnormality is that you have two brains, the one now
diseased, which is the only one that has ever functioned as a brain, and another,
right beside it, lying dormant—healthy and perfectly capable of performing a
whole brain’s functions should the need arise, but nevertheless never yet
functioning as a brain and not currently encoded with any of your psychology.
There is a simple procedure the doctors can perform to switch the roles of
your two brains: all of the encoded psychology on your diseased brain will be
transferred to the healthy one; as it is transferred, it will be erased from your
diseased brain, whereupon your healthy brain will begin to function just as
the diseased one did (and would have continued to function had it been healthy
and left alone).

Suppose that the procedure is as quick and as simple (and as abrupt) as

flipping a switch, that it will not affect subjective psychology, and that
consciousness will be continuous throughout the procedure. Indeed, suppose

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that you (and the person who emerges from the procedure) will not even notice
any change. Once the transfer is completed, almost instantaneously, your
diseased brain will become dormant and pose no further threat to your
organism’s physical or psychological health. In these imagined circumstances,
how much would it matter to you that the brain of yours that has always
sustained your psychology will no longer sustain it, while another that has
never sustained it will sustain it from now on? Probably not much. The
procedure would not be as bad as death. Unless the procedure caused existential
anxiety, it would not even be as bad as a root canal. So much for the derivative
value of the organs that have actually sustained our psychologies.

Those who are skeptical of this response might imagine that whereas the

procedure described is the simplest way of disabling the threat to the organism
posed by your diseased brain, it is not the only way. An alternative procedure
the doctors can perform is to repair your diseased brain through a series of
twenty brain operations spread over the next twenty years of your life. Each
operation will cost about one-half of your annual salary (suppose that insurance
does not and probably never will cover the procedure) and will require two
months of hospitalization. In addition, the operations will be disfiguring. When
they are finally completed, you will be healthy enough, but your life will have
been seriously disrupted and your body and face will be somewhat deformed.
We assume that on your scale of values, the disruption, expense, and
disfigurement, while bad, are not as bad as death. (If they are as bad as death,
reduce their severity to the point where they are not quite as bad as death.) So,
if the first procedure is as bad as death, then the second procedure is a better
choice. Which procedure would you choose? We think that many, if not, most
people would choose the first procedure.

Finally, a critic might object that even though the preservation of one’s

body might not matter in survival, it still might be necessary for personal
persistence. However, in the case of many of the exotic examples under
discussion in the personal identity literature, including the one just discussed,
Parfit has argued that the question of whether one persists is an empty question.
Once one knows all of the physical and psychological ways in which the earlier
and later persons are related, and how the earlier person evolved (or
transformed) into the later person, one knows everything there is to know
about the situation that is relevant to the question of personal persistence.
There is no further fact to know, including no further fact about whether in
such circumstances one actually persists. That is, in the case of such examples,
there may be no truth of the matter about whether one persists.

One of Parfit’s most controversial claims emerged in connection with his

discussion of his notorious ‘branch line’ example. He asks you to put yourself
imaginatively into the place of a person on Earth who is trying to teletransport
to Mars. You enter the teletransportation booth and push the button, acti-
vating the process. You succeed in producing a replica of yourself on Mars;
but because the teletransporter has malfunctioned you fail to dematerialize

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on Earth. A few minutes later you emerge from the teletransporter and are
told believably that due to the malfunctioning teletransporter your heart has
been damaged and you have only two more days to live. Parfit argues that in
such a case you should not be too concerned. Rather, you ought to regard
your replica’s persistence—now taking place on Mars—as an adequate
surrogate for what might have been your own persistence on Earth (Ibid.:
200–1). While not many philosophers have followed Parfit in taking this
line, explaining convincingly why one should not take it without returning
to the view that identity is what matters primarily in survival has not been
easy.

Since 1970, the third major development in personal identity theory has

been the emergence of theories according to which persons are four-
dimensional objects. On the traditional three-dimensional view, a person is
wholly present at a given moment, say, you are wholly present right now.
Some philosophers have argued that we should replace this three-dimensional
view with a four-dimensional view, according to which only time-slices or
‘stages’ of persons exist at short intervals of time. On this four-dimensional
view, persons are aggregates of momentary person-stages, beginning with
the person-stage that came into being at a person’s birth and ending with
the person-stage that existed when the person died, and including every
person-stage between birth and death.

To see one of the most important reasons why for personal identity theory

it might matter which of these two views is correct, consider again any of
the fission examples (except the branch-line case) discussed above. In
commenting on each of those examples, it was suggested that the pre-fission
person is not identical with either of his post-fission-descendants. That was
a three-dimensional way of describing the situation. A four-dimensionalist
would have said that what we are calling ‘the pre-fission person’ is really
not a person but rather a person-stage and that what we are calling ‘the post-
fission-descendants’ are also person-stages. According to a four-
dimensionalist, in a fission-example the pre-fission person does not cease.
Rather what happens is that the pre-fission person-stage becomes a shared
person-stage. That is, two persons, whose post-fission person-stages are
separate from the others overlap prior to fission and, thus, share their pre-
fission person-stages.

Philosophers have used this four-dimensional way of conceptualizing what

is going on in a fission example to argue that fission examples cannot be
used to argue that identity is not what matters in survival. According to
these philosophers, fission examples cannot be so used because in a fission
example no one ceases (and, hence, identity is never traded for other
benefits). Rather, what happens in a fission example is that the stages of two
persons are shared stages prior to the fission, and then simply no longer
shared after fission. Since, on this view, a given person-stage may be part of
two or three (or potentially any number) of persons, this view is sometimes

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called the multiple-occupancy view of persons. Although it has its defenders,
so far most personal identity theorists seem to have remained with the
traditional three-dimensional view.

Why the theoretical revolution was so long in coming

Since fission examples were discussed throughout the eighteenth century why
didn’t the same sort of theoretical revolution that has occurred in our own
time occur then, at least in the work of those who were sympathetic to a
relational account of personal identity? For fission examples to have
precipitated something like the post-1960s revolution in personal identity
theory, it was not necessary for earlier theorists to have anticipated the
development of other theories, such as the semantics of modal logic, that were
not available until recently. Eighteenth-century theorists had all the theory
they needed to make the moves that would not be made by theorists generally
until our own times. Yet seriously questioning the importance of personal
identity, which seemingly is so easily provoked by the consideration of fission
examples and can arise even independently of them, apparently did not occur
to anyone before Priestley and Hazlitt, nor, in the tradition that became analytic
philosophy, to anyone after them, until our own times. Why not?

An important part of the answer is that, as we have seen, there were not

many influential eighteenth century theorists who were sympathetic to a
relational account of personal identity: really only Locke and Hume, and Hume
chose not to dirty his hands with discussion of the kinds of examples that
might have led him to anticipate post-1960s developments. Collins, in the
long run, was not an important philosopher and may even have set the cause
of personal identity theory back by allowing himself to be upstaged by Clarke.
Berkeley, Butler, Reid and Tucker were substance theorists. Law, whose
account was readily available from the 1770s in Locke’s collected works, was
largely pragmatic about personal identity, and did not consider the kind of
puzzle cases that intrigue relational theorists. And Priestley and Hazlitt had
the misfortune of writing in a materialistic vein just before Kant burst onto
the scene with his ‘transcendental ego’, which changed the topic and—whether
intentionally or not—redirected nineteenth century ego-theorists toward
idealism. In short, the revolution in personal identity theory that has occurred
in our own times requires that thinkers go beyond the relational view of
personal identity. But before they could go beyond that view, they first had to
accept it. And, surprising as it may seem to us today, in the tradition that
became analytic philosophy, the relational view was not generally accepted
until the twentieth century, by which time fission examples, despite the brief
mention of them in Locke, Reid, and Bradley had been forgotten.

Another part of the answer is that, in the eighteenth century, fission examples

tended to be introduced into the debate over personal identity by soul-theorists
as an objection to a Lockean relational view. Those, like Collins, who were

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sympathetic to Locke, were intent on defending a Lockean view against a
threatened retreat back into what they regarded as obscurantist metaphysics.
They saw fission examples as possibly motivating such a retreat. So, the context
was not conducive to their seeing that fission examples, rather than an objection
to a relational approach, were a way of pushing that approach to even more
radical conclusions. In short, eighteenth century followers of Locke wanted
to save the territory they had gained rather than push their new found advantage
as far as it would take them; in the personal identity wars, they were
Eisenhowers, rather than Pattons.

Finally, before many thinkers could seriously question the importance of

personal identity in survival, the influence of Christianity had to be blunted.
From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, most important western thinkers
who took self and personal identity theory seriously were Christians and as
such accepted the idea that there will be a resurrection attended by divine
rewards and punishments. Few had Priestley’s ability, or his motiva-tion, to
envision how those rewards and punishments might on a relational view, let
alone in the absence of personal persistence, still serve the cause of divine
justice.

Today, in the opinion of many thinkers, including some of the most

influential, our bodies, or at least the physical mechanisms that underlie our
consciousness, which almost all thinkers assume must exist continuously for
the people whose mechanisms they are to persist, have replaced the immaterial
soul as the bedrock on which our destinies, if anywhere, can rest secure. The
more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nineteenth century psychology of self

In 1805, when Hazlitt published his Essay, what at the time was called mental
philosophy was well on its way to spawning psychology, an empirical science
that would, by the end of the century, emerge as a discipline separate from
philosophy. However, the emergence of two distinct disciplines—philosophy
as much moving away from psychology as the reverse—would take most of
the century to achieve.

The same mixing of metaphysical and empirical issues

that was so prevalent in the eighteenth century would continue to infect the
thinking of major nineteenth century British theorists. And, while religious
dogma would no longer dominate discussions of the mind, the presuppositions
of an indivisible soul continued to work in the background of many discussions
of the ego, even among many progressive thinkers.

Consider, for example, the work of Thomas Brown, James Mill and John

Stuart Mill on self and personal identity. In 1820, Brown’s Lectures on the
Philosophy of the Human Mind were much more psychological than
philosophical, though he believed that mental philosophy had implications
for epistemology (Brown 1820). Nevertheless, for the most part he studied
phenomena of mind from a realist perspective. When he dealt with the issue
of personal identity, which he preferred to call mental identity, he was interested

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in analysing how we come to suppose that the self that remembers is the same
one that is remembered. Viewing all conscious mental states as ‘feeling’, or
experiential, states of various kinds, he suggested that ‘the belief of our mental
identity’ is ‘founded on an essential principle of our constitution’, in
consequence of which, ‘it is impossible for us to consider our successive
feelings, without regarding them as truly our successive feelings’, that is, as
‘states, or affections of one thinking substance’ (Ibid.: v.1, 133). From such
intuitions of the substantial identity underlying successive (that is, proximate)
experiences, one readily goes on to view more distant remembered experiences
as one’s own as well, thus conceiving of an identical self underlying the stream
of conscious experiences.

James Mill built on Brown’s observations, but tried to reduce all mental

phenomena to associations. When Mill considered the problem of identity,
he, first, dealt with the notion of identity of objects, which he accounted for
in terms of associated resemblances over time. In the case of persons, he
supposed that necessarily when one remembers having some experience, one
believes that it was oneself who had it. In such cases of memory, he maintained,
‘the Evidence’ of one’s own existence, and ‘the Belief’ in it ‘are not different
things, but the same thing’ (Mill 1829: v.2, 168). In the case of times that one
does not remember, but times when one nevertheless believes one existed,
one relies on verbal evidence from others, which is itself based on observations
that others have made of one’s bodily and psychological continuity and
resemblances among person stages. In Mill’s quite naturalistic view, the self
can be observed by other people. He, thus, focussed less on mental identity,
than on a body-based personal identity. His son John Stuart, would later find
inconsistencies in his father’s view (Ibid.: 174).

Brown and James Mill were predominately psychological in their theories,

and for that reason, their thinking has been appreciated subsequently more by
psychologists than by philosophers. For instance, William James applauded
Brown’s discussions of connectedness in the stream of consciousness, and
quoted Brown in his famous chapter on the ‘stream of thought’, in Principles
of Psychology’ (James 1890: 248, 276–7). Likewise, psychologists at the end
of the nineteenth century regarded James Mill’s associative psychology as an
important advance on Hartley’s approach. By contrast, they tended to consider
John Stuart Mill’s psychology, which has been greatly appreciated by early
twentieth century analytical philosophers, as too philosophical.

John Stuart Mill’s ‘psychology’ was primarily epistemology. By 1865, when

he wrote his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, it had been
thirty-five years since his father’s book was first published, and much had
changed in the relations between philosophy and psychology (Mill 1865).
Kantian philosophy had come to Britain, and Hamilton had tried unsuccessfully
to integrate it with the Scottish common sense approach. In 1856, James Ferrier,
who opposed Hamilton as much as John Stuart Mill later would, published
his Institutes of Metaphysic, in which he made a disciplinary distinction

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between metaphysics and psychology, declaring that metaphysics belonged
to philosophy, and had to be purified of all naturalistic reasoning (Ferrier
1856). Ferrier, an apostate of the Scottish school, saw metaphysics as composed
of ‘Epistemology’ and ‘Ontology’, thus introducing the term ‘epistemology’
into the English language. He viciously attacked Reid, declaring him
philosophically incompetent and rejected as failed epistemology the naturalistic
and psychological approach to the mind that Reid had tried so hard to
promote.

John Stuart Mill would follow a similar line in criticizing Reid’s intuition-

ism. In place of intuition, Mill thought that his own phenomenalist project,
which he called the psychological theory, was a kind of foundational
psychology; but it was psychology in the sense in which Hume’s main focus
in Book 1 of the Treatise was psychology. In Mill’s view, the external world
is a ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’, and other minds are inferred to
exist based on an analogy with one’s own case, which Mill presumed one
knows directly. Like objects in the external world, Mill supposed that minds
too are just actual and possible sensations. Since the ego or self is not given in
experience, accounting for self-knowledge was a problem for his theory. He
responded that self-knowledge must be based on an intuitive belief in our
own continued existence that comes with our ability to remember past states
of mind as our own. Mill’s view would later influence Russell and other
twentieth century sense-data theorists (Mill 1865:225–64).

There were real psychological theories of the self beginning to emerge in

the nineteenth century, which were developmental as well as empirical, but
they were not emerging in Britain. British theorists, having brushed aside or
in most cases never even heard of Hazlitt’s developmental psychology, were
still torturing themselves over grounds for personal identity, rather than
considering how a concept of self is actually acquired. In Germany, shortly
after Hazlitt wrote the Essay, J.Herbart, the successor at Konigsberg to Kant,
wrote several works that were primarily psychological, including his Textbook
of Psychology (1813) and Psychology as a Science (1824–5), in which he
advocated, based in part on his general theory of how concepts or ideas emerge
out of experience, that one acquires in developmental stages the concept of
self.

In his view, initially the idea comes from one’s experience of one’s

bodily activities, which provides us with information about ourselves as well
as about objects in the world with which we interact. Eventually, we form an
organized idea of our own body as our self. But then, as we become more
thoughtful, and relate past to present thoughts, we come to identify more with
our ideas than our bodies and thereby develop a notion of an ego or subject of
our thoughts. We then generalize this as an abstract ego, or identical subject
of experience, that persists throughout our lives.

Meanwhile, in France, Maine de Biran, following the leads of Destutt

deTracy and P.J.G. Cabanis, also formulated a developmental account of self.

De Biran’s focus was on the active or voluntary self, which we first notice in

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experiencing the resistence of the world to our desires. The continuity of
voluntary or effortful experience provides us with the ground for our concept
of ourselves extended over time. In the main, subsequent nineteenth century
accounts of the development of the self that had a psychological orientation
would build on the insights of Herbart and de Biran more than on those of the
British tradition.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, theories of dissociation of

personality were also introduced. Dissociation was a phenomenon made salient
to scientists when Anton Mesmer, in the eighteenth century, demonstrated
what was later called hypnotism. But it took a while for the empirical nature
of the phenomenon to come under experimental control. During most of the
nineteenth century, dissociative phenomena, such as hypnotism, were not
investigated scientifically. Cases of dual consciousness were reported by
medical authorities, but they remained mysterious incidents open to religious
and other outmoded explanations. Toward the end of the century, a number of
cases of dissociative phenomena, including dual and multiple personality, were
investigated by scientifically oriented doctors, and the relationship between
hypnosis and some of these other dissociative states was recognized. Some
theorists hypthesized relations between dissociative phenomena and brain
activity, without yet having a detailed understanding of that connection. The
basic idea of these scientists was that various dissociations involving
personality might be due to lack of normal integration of brain activity.

One of the earlier scientific psychologists to take a brain-oriented view of

dissociation of personality was Theodule Ribot, the ‘father’ of the French
school of psychopathology. In Diseases of Personality, Ribot was not hesitant
to contrast his scientific view of the phenomenon of personality with a
traditional metaphysical view:

By ‘person’ in psychological language we understand generally
the individual, as clearly conscious of itself, and acting accordingly:
it is the highest form of individuality. To explain this attribute,
which it reserves exclusively for man, metaphysical psychology is
satisfied with the hypothesis of the ego, absolutely one, simple,
and identical. Unfortunately, however this is only an illusive
clearness and a semblance of a solution. Unless we attribute to
this ego a supernatural origin, it will be necessary to explain how
it is born, and from what lower form it proceeds. Accordingly,
experimental psychology must propound the problem differently,
and treat it by different methods.

(Ribot 1891:1)

He went on to contrast the two hypotheses generated by these two
psychologies: ‘the one, a very old hypothesis, which regards consciousness
as the fundamental property of the “soul” or “mind”, as that which constitutes

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its essence’, the other, ‘a very recent theory, which regards it as a simple
phenomenon, superadded to the brain’, an ‘event having its own conditions of
existence, appearing and disappearing according to circumstance’ (Ibid.: 3–
4). He pointed out that although the first hypothesis has ‘held sway for
centuries’ it cannot explain the ‘unconscious life of the mind’, whereas the
second ‘expresses the unconscious in physiological terms’. He took this to be
a virtue of the second hypothesis since, in his view, ‘nervous activity is far
more extensive than psychic activity’.

Ribot claimed that every conscious episode is a complex event that is

‘superadded’ to ‘a particular state of the nervous system’, and that ‘all
manifestations of psychic life, sensations, desires, feelings, volitions,
memories, reasonings, inventions, etc., may be alternately conscious and
unconscious’ (Ibid.: 5–6). As he put it, consciousness is just a ‘perfection’ of
physiological conditions, though one that needs to be explained in terms of
its concrete conditions of appearance. He pointed out that the alternative
hypothesis, that the soul’s essence is thinking and that it ‘is impossible that
consciousness should not exist even when not a trace of it is left in memory’,
begs the question (Ibid.: 8). Thus, his empiricism began on the same grounds
as Locke’s, but pushed much further the hypothesis of thinking matter; and
proposed to investigate directly the physiological conditions of the
‘superaddition’ of consciousness.

Ribot goes through numerous cases of diseases of personality including

physical ones, such as the ‘double monsters’ (the Hungarian twins), that were
parodied in Scriblerus, as well as psychological cases of multiple personality.
He said that the former provides evidence of the physical basis of personality,
while the latter suggests that the ego is merely a synthesis of conscious states
of the organism.

Toward the end of his book, he said that ‘the organism and

the brain, as its highest representation, constitute the real personality,
containing in itself all that we have been and the possibilities of all that we
shall be’. In the brain, ‘the whole individual character is inscribed’, together
‘with all its active and passive aptitudes, sympathies, and antipathies; its genius,
talents, or stupidity; its virtues, vices, torpor, or activity’. ‘What emerges and
reaches consciousness’, he said, ‘is little compared with what lies buried below,
albeit still active. Conscious personality is never more than a feeble portion
of physical personality’.

Turning, then, to consideration of the ego, Ribot continued, ‘The unity of

the ego, in a psychological sense, is, accordingly, the cohesion, during a given
period, of a certain number of distinct states of consciousness, accompanied
by others less distinct, and by a multitude of physiological states which, though
not accompanied by consciousness like the others, yet operate as powerfully
as they if not more so’. He concluded that ‘Unity means co-ordination’ and
that consciousness being subordinate to the organism, ‘the problem of the
unity of the ego is, in its ultimate form, a biological problem’. So, ‘to biology
belongs the task of explaining, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the

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solidarity of their component parts’. ‘Psychological interpretation’, he concluded,
‘can only follow in its wake’ (Ibid.: 154–6). Ribot appealed to the theory of
evolution to support his view that biology is the ultimate ground upon which
psychology—even human personality—is built.

The importance of social existence for a genetic psychology of self was not

recognized until late in the century, in the work of James Mark Baldwin, an
American experimental psychologist. Baldwin had been a student of James
McCosh, the last member, and historian, of the Scottish school. Among
psychologists, Baldwin is generally regarded as the first developmental
psychologist of self. His wide-ranging genetic psychology had an enormous
influence on subsequent developmentalists, particularly on Piaget. According
to Baldwin, in History of Psychology, the discovery of social influence on the
origins of the ego depended in part on the rise in evolutionary thinking, and in
part on the anti-individualistic, collectivist orientation that emerged in the latter
part of the nineteenth century (Baldwin 1913).

Baldwin and his friend, Josiah Royce, the American philosopher, apparently

recognized the social origins of the self at about the same time, publishing their
ideas in the mid-1890s in different works. Royce, in his original paper on the
topic, pointed out that his goal is to provide an explanation for the variations in
self-consciousness that are found empirically, in particular, in abnormal
psychology, rather than consider ‘the philosophical aspects of the problem of
self-consciousness [which] belong altogether elsewhere’ (Royce 1894:169).
What he noted about the abnormalities of self-consciousness is that they typically
involve patients’ estimations of their relations with others, that is, they are
‘maladies of social consciousness’. For evidence of abnormal variations in self-
consciousness, he referred to Ribot’s book on Diseases of Personality, but
proposed that these variations have their origins in social consciousness.

In The World and the Individual, Royce described, in words reminiscent of

Hazlitt but probably inspired by Hegel, what he took to be a fundamental fact
thought to be at the root of the social origin of self-consciousness: ‘Were no
difference observed between the contents which constitute the observed presence
of my neighbor, and the contents which constitute my own life in the same
moment, then my sense of my neighbor’s presence, and my idea of myself,
would blend in my consciousness, and there would be so far neither Alter nor
Ego observed’ (Royce 1901:263). Earlier Royce had written:

Self-conscious functions are all of them, in their finite, human and
primary aspect, social functions, due to habits of social intercourse.
They involve the presentation of some contrast between Ego and
non-Ego. This psychological contrast is primarily that between the
subject’s own conscious act, idea, intent, or other experience, and
an experience which is regarded by him as representing the state of
another’s mind.

(Royce 1894:196)

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Although self-consciousness begins only in social relations to others, Royce
argued that eventually it includes other aspects of the physical world. ‘By
means of habits gradually acquired, this contrast [between self and other]
early comes to be extended to include that between one’s inner states and the
represented realities that make up the physical world’ (Ibid.). Hence, in contrast
to Herbart and de Biran, it is not the opposition of the world that makes us
self-conscious, but originally, it is our relations with other animate beings, in
particular human beings, by which we become aware of ourselves. This, then,
generalizes to our other relations with the world.

The fundamental principle of Baldwin’s theory was that imitation or

mimicry was the foundation of social life and the origin of the infant’s
understanding of the category person. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, this principle had been suggested in theories about the role of mimicry
in sympathetic imagination. Adam Smith, in particular, likened imagination
to mimicry, and connected both to sympathy and through it to social
phenomena. Later on, Dugald Stewart, Reid’s student, who replaced Smith at
Edinburgh, would recognize what he called sympathetic imitation as an
important social phenomenon. He even postulated that such mimicry was
especially powerful in childhood, and as such, at the very foundations of social
life.

However, with the possible exception of Hazlitt, what none of the

eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century philosophers or psychologists
recognized was how these phenomena were connected to the development of
the infant’s acquired knowledge of ego and alter as persons, with minds. These
thinkers were caught up in an individualistic perspective. Understanding one’s
own mind, either came immediately in experience through reflexive self-
knowledge, or was acquired prior to acquiring knowledge of the minds of
others. But, by the end of the century James Baldwin and Josiah Royce were
able to go beyond this.

Baldwin, in particular, had an especially clear grip on the concept of mental

development. In contrasting the old-fashioned soul view (‘a fixed substance,
with fixed attributes’), he said that it was as if ‘knowledge of the soul was
immediate in consciousness, and adequate’. ‘The mind was best understood
where best or most fully manifested; its higher “faculties” even when not in
operation, were still there, but asleep’. It was, he said, as if soul-theorists
assumed that ‘the man is father of the child’. ‘If the adult consciousness shows
the presence of principles not observable in the child consciousness, we must
suppose, nevertheless, that they are really present in the child consciousness
beyond the reach of our observation’. The proper procedure (‘the genetic idea’),
Baldwin claimed, is precisely the opposite of this.

Instead of a fixed substance, we have the conception of a growing,
developing activity. Functional psychology succeeds faculty
psychology. Instead of beginning with the most elaborate exhibition
of this growth and development, we shall find most instruction in

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the simplest activity that is at the same time the same activity.
Development is a process of involution as well as evolution, and
the elements come to be hidden under the forms of complexity
which they build up.

(Baldwin 1894:2–3)

Instead of the traditional approach, he claimed, we must try to explain adult
behavior on the basis of ‘faculties’ available also to the child, and then, if that
fails, trace the development of those faculties in the process of maturation:

Are there principles in the adult consciousness which do not appear
in the child consciousness, then the adult consciousness must, if
possible, be interpreted by principles present in the child
consciousness; and when this is not possible, the conditions under
which later principles take their rise and get their development
must still be adequately explored.

(Ibid.: 3)

No one in the eighteenth century had such a clear grasp of the notion of mental
development. No one, even today, has a clearer grasp.

In Baldwin’s theory of the origins of self-consciousness, the child first

becomes aware of others as persons, rather than of itself. This, Baldwin calls
‘the projective phase’. Subsequently, the child becomes aware of its own
‘subjective’ activity. In this phase, self-awareness comes about through
mimicry of others, but this time through the volition involved in trying to
imitate. In the next, ‘ejective phase’, the child comes to understand what others
feel by ‘ejecting’ his own inner states onto them: ‘The subjective becomes
ejective; that is, other people’s bodies, says the child to himself, have
experiences in them such as mine has. They also have me’s’. In this third
phase, Baldwin concludes, ‘the social self is born’ (Ibid.: 335–8). In sum, as
the infant develops it goes through various stages in acquiring a subjective
understanding of mind, all of which involve some form of mimicry and,
eventually, differentiation of self and other.

In History of Psychology, Baldwin, rather than presenting his own particular

view of the matter, generalizes the basic principles of his social–psychological
approach to self-consciousness:

In the personal self, the social is individualized…. A constant give-
and-take process—a ‘social dialectic’—is found between the
individual and his social fellows. By this process the materials of
selfhood are absorbed and assimilated. The ‘self’ is a gradually
forming nucleus in the mind; a mass of feeling, effort, and
knowledge. It grows in feeling by contagion, in knowledge by
imitation, in will by opposition and obedience. The outline of the

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individual gradually appears, and every stage it shows the pattern
of the social situation in which it becomes constantly a more and
more adequate and competent unit.

He continued:

The consciousness of the self, thus developed, carries with it that of
the ‘alter’-selves, the other ‘socii’, who are also determinations of
the same social matter. The bond, therefore, that binds the members
of the group together is reflected in the self-consciousness of each
member…. When the self has become a conscious and active person,
we may say that the mental individual as such is born. But the
individual remains part of the whole out of which he has arisen, a
whole that is collective in character and of which he is a specification.

(Baldwin 1913:108–9)

Since Baldwin, this collectivist vision of the origins of self consciousness, which
was beyond the scope of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers, has
in the twentieth century come to dominate the psychology of the self. While in
the twentieth century most analytic philosophers, in accounting for personal
identity, have maintained an individualistic agenda, psychologists have found
the origins and identity of the individual self only within a shared social reality.

Contemporary psychology of self

Psychologists in our own times who are interested in the origins of self-
consciousness have tried, like Baldwin, to connect an evolutionary and
developmental approach. Moreover, they have worked under the supposition
that knowing one’s own mind as such, is related to knowing that others also
have minds. Two papers published in the 1970s were important in focusing
attention on this topic. Nicholas Humphrey proposed that human intelligence
evolved primarily as social intelligence, and that our capacity to become
conscious of our own mental states served the function of allowing us to
understand the mental states of others. He suggested that by having access to
our mental states, we could use our own minds to simulate the minds of others,
imagining what we would feel and do in their situations. Such simu-lation could
also help us anticipate our own reactions to imagined situations that do not
currently exist but which might occur. Thus, we could not only understand and
anticipate the actions and reactions of others, but we could understand and
anticipate our own reactions to various possible future events (Humphrey 1976).

Within a year of Humphrey’s article, Premack and Woodruff published a

paper titled, ‘Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?’ It was known at the
time that chimpanzees could recognize themselves in a mirror, although almost
all other organisms with the exception of humans could not do so (soon it was

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learned that orang-utans, but not gorillas, are able to recognize themselves).
It was also known that infants could not recognize themselves in mirrors until
they are 18 months old. But self-recognition, although it can be taken to imply
knowledge of oneself as an independent being, does not imply either that one
is reflexively aware of one’s own mind or that one is aware that other similar
beings also have minds. The Premack and Woodruff paper attempted to provide
evidence that chimpanzees have theoretical understanding of the contents of
other individuals’ minds, which could reflect on their understanding of minds
as such—including their own (Premack and Woodruff 1978). In commentaries
on the original article and elsewhere, Premack and Woodruff’s conclusions
have been hotly debated. It is still in doubt whether chimps appreciate mental
states, whether of themselves or others. Nevertheless, a burgeoning area of
research in comparative and developmental psychology has been spawned.

Although the debate over whether any other organisms really have the

capacity to understand mental phenomena as such still rages, in the case of
humans the developmental story is fairly clear. In certain important respects,
this story connects to some of the discoveries made during the eighteenth and
nineteenth century that we considered. The developmentalists have tried to
trace the origins of consciousness of self and other from infancy. They have
discovered that almost at birth the infant is sensitive to the difference between
humans and inanimate objects. There is also evidence that infants have the
ability to recognize and contagiously mimic both emotional and other facial
expressions. Thus, are laid the foundations of the ‘social self’, one that
participates in feelings and activities with other beings of the same species.
This does not yet imply any reflective awareness of such participation and, as
we shall see, such awareness does not appear until much later.

The infant also becomes aware of its ‘ecological self’ early on, in a kind of

self-knowledge that distinguishes its boundaries from the world within which
it acts.

This would be the kind of self-information recognized by Herbart

and de Biran, in which the infant becomes aware of its body parts and how it
can manipulate and control them in ways it cannot do with respect to other
objects.

Theorists have supposed, in addition, that during the first year of life as the

infant acquires greater knowledge of its body, it also becomes better able to
appreciate parallels between its own body and the bodies of others. So by
mid-year the infant is beginning, purposely, to imitate the bodily movements
of others. Yet, it also continues contagiously to mimic emotional expressions.
Toward the end of the first year, the infant is able to participate with others in
shared activities, and can, through attending to the emotional expressions of
others, become aware of the meaning of these expressions with respect to
other objects. Yet, at this time, infants are still not aware of distinctions between
their own mental attitudes toward objects and those of other individuals with
whom they interact. They merely enter into and share the attitudes with
significant others. It is only at the beginning of the second year of life that the

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infant becomes increasingly aware of self and other as separate individuals
with possibly different attitudes toward the same objects or events (Barresi
and Moore 1996).

From our perspective, one of the interesting phenomena that occurs during

this period are the infant’s sympathetic responses to others’ emotional
expressions. In humans, but not lower animals, emotional contagion is typically
a stage on the way toward understanding the point of view of another and
sympathizing with it. As Hoffman, in particular, has shown, there is in humans,
from the age of about 10 to 18 months, a gradual development of its
understanding of the sources of its contagiously acquired emotions (Hoffman
1977). For instance, typically an infant of 10 months responds to the distress
(e.g., crying) of another by becoming distressed itself, as a consequence of
which it consoles only itself while ignoring the other. Later, apparently
realizing that it shares a common emotion with the other, intermittently it
consoles the other as well as itself. Eventually, the infant may no longer cry,
but apparently recognizing that it is the other who is sad simply tries to console
the other. Subsequently the normal child’s sympathetic responses show an
increasing sensitivity to the needs of others, not merely by consoling them,
but by responding more specifically to their mental states and motivations
based on a better appreciation of their points of view.

This is one, among several phenomena, including mirror self-recognition,

which indicate that the 18-month- to 2-year-old child has begun to differentiate
between self and other, and to acquire an appreciation of certain mental states
of self and other as existing concurrently, yet as different from each other. At
this time, the child is also acquiring mastery in language, which greatly
facilitates its communicating about mental states. Even so, most researchers
are convinced that 2-year-olds do not yet have what researchers call a
(representational) theory of mind. The child at this time is competent in dealing
with perceptually available mental states in self and other, but is not yet able
to represent mental states that may have existed in the past or will exist in the
future, but are not currently present. Nor at this stage are children able to deal
with mental states, such as belief, that misrepresent current states of affairs.
Since Premack and Woodruff’s paper, theorists have called the possession of
such capacities the possession of a theory of mind.

In the classic study by

Wimmer and Perner, published in 1983, it was shown that not until children
are 4 years old are they capable of representing correctly another’s false belief
(Wimmer and Perner 1983). Three-year-olds merely assume that the other
knows what they themselves know, even when this could not be the case, say,
because the other was not available to acquire the knowledge.

The discovery that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, were capable of

representing false belief sparked an enormous amount of research on what
came to be known as the age-4 transition, and important other findings were
made. For instance, it was discovered that besides understanding false belief
as it applied to another’s mind, the child was also acquiring the ability to

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distinguish appearance from reality, as well as that different people might
from their own points of view see things differently. But the child also learned
more about its own mental states at this time. At this age it is first able to
remember its own past beliefs that were false, as well as to remember previous
desires that had changed. It also acquired an understanding of itself as extended
in time, but as transforming through time and, more generally, it acquires an
autobiographical self. There is also evidence that, at this time, the child first
begins to deal with a future self, whose motives differ from its own current
motives.

Collectively these findings suggest that the child becomes generally

conscious of its own mental states—past, present, and future—at the same
time as it becomes able to represent abstractly (as opposed to perceive) the
mental states of others. In other words, the child at this time becomes conscious
of her own mind, as well as of the minds of others, and comes to form a belief
in the existence of mind or, at least, in the existence of private, representational
mental states that can differ among individuals and within an individual over
time. At this time, the child thus acquires both a ‘private self’ and an ‘extended
self’. In effect, it is only at this late date in development that the child acquires
reflexive consciousness, in the eighteenth century meaning of that term. Thus,
only after the child turns 4 can they begin to form a concept of personal identity
or self as a mind (or consciousness) that persists over time. And it is apparently
a necessary condition for the child to form a concept of its own mind as such,
that it be able to conceive that other individuals also have minds. Apparently,
without the distinction between mental states in self and other (or between
present, past, and future mental states of itself), the child would form no notion
of mental states as states of mind at all. These findings in the developmental
psychology of self also suggest that reflexive consciousness, far from being
an intrinsic property of mind, may only be a theoretical construct, and that
the mind itself may be a fiction, that is, a theory that children in Western
culture acquire in order to explain human behavior.

What price self-knowledge?

As our survey reveals, the history of theorizing in the west about self and
personal identity is a story of increasing fragmentation. Repeatedly what began
as one question has become two, and then eventually even more. And the rate
at which old questions have spawned new ones has accelerated. In classical
Greece, in the hands of Plato, the more or less empirical question of whether
selves survive bodily death gave birth to the primarily philosophical question
of personal identity. That philosophical question is the question of what it is
that makes us the same people from moment to moment, day to day, and so
on. Arguably, before the empirical question can be answered, the philosophical
one has to be answered. Over time, the number and complexity of competing
answers to the philosophical question has continued to grow, with no signs

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that the process is slowing down, and with no theoretical con-vergence in
sight.

From Plato until Locke, substance accounts of the nature of personal identity

carried the day. But such seeming theoretical unanimity masks the reality that
throughout late antiquity and into the Middle Ages different sorts of competing
substance accounts were continually being proposed. Some of these highlighted
the distinction between the immaterial soul and matter, others stressed their
integration as matter and form, and so on. Once Locke proposed a relational
account of personal identity, discussion of these earlier alternatives slowed
down, but it never vanished completely and to this day, the competition between
these alternatives has never been resolved.

Initially, the relational alternative to the traditional substance views was

just Locke’s simple memory theory, which was a mentalistic version of the
relations account that highlighted just one element of minds. But eventually
other sorts of mentalistic-relations accounts have been proposed, as well as
competing bodily-relations accounts, in which different sorts of bodily relations
have been stressed. Some, for instance, have focused on the importance of the
continuous existence of the organic brain, others on just certain parts of the
organic brain, still others merely on a material brain, whether organic or not,
still others on some other sort of bodily continuity.

All of these mentalistic- and bodily-relations views were just variations on

what in time came to be recognized as an internal relations view. In our own
times, all internal relational views, of whatever sort, in addition to competing
with each other have had to compete with external relations views. Among
external relation theorists, three-dimensionalists about persons have had to
contend continually with the objections of four-dimensionalists, and vice versa;
and so it goes on. It is difficult even for anyone to follow just this strand of the
evolving tradition of answers to the philosophical question of identity. But it
is not just this strand that matters or just the answers to the traditional question
that continually move on. The question itself has moved on.

As we have seen, as early as Lucretius the philosophical question of personal

identity has had to share the limelight with the question of what matters
primarily in survival. Until recently the two questions were not often thought
of as two. Even so, both were there continuing to exercise an influence on the
way theorists thought about self and personal identity. In the aftermath of
Locke’s new theory, the two questions began to take on a life of their own,
and then in our own times have been reborn, increasingly becoming two
separate traditions of inquiry.

While all of this was going on, beginning in the eighteenth century a science

of mind, with new empirical approaches and agendas, slowly separated itself
from traditionally philosophical concerns and made its appearance. Soon, what
began in the early eighteenth century as different approaches to the same
questions (see, for instance, Butler’s discussion of alternative ways to approach
the same questions about human nature) soon evolved into different approaches

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to what began to be seen by the theorists involved as related but distinct
concerns. And throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, as
psychology separated from philosophy and consolidated its status as a separate
discipline, questions, answers, and approaches—in each disci-pline—
continued to multiply. Today, few philosophers of personal identity know much
about related developments in the contemporary psychology of self and
identity, and few psychologists know much about related developments in
philosophy. Beyond that, few philosophers or psychologists know much about
related developments in separate traditions even within their own disciplines.
For instance, few philosophers who are engaged in the analytic consideration
of these issues know much about related work being done in phenomenological
traditions. And an analogous situation exists among psychologists; few who
have been trained in experimental research know much about related work
being done in phenomenological traditions.

The problem posed by researchers working in isolation from others who

are working on similar problems is not so much due to arrogance or lack of
interest, though there is plenty of both to go around. The more fundamental
problem is simply lack of time. There is too much to know, even in one’s own
little niche, to leave time for plumbing the depths of other traditions and
approaches. And this problem is going to get worse—one would like to add,
‘before it gets better’, except for the certainty that it never is going to get
better. It is just going to get worse. No doubt, eventually it is going to get so
much worse that current perplexity at what to do about it will some day be
looked back upon nostalgically as quaint.

Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, many important thinkers

of the time faced a kind of existential crisis concerning the self. It was due to
the emergence as a question of what previously it had seemed could not
possibly be a question—whether we even exist as selves that persist. What
previously would have been a laughably improbable answer to that question
had suddenly become plausible. Today our sense of crisis has a different cause.
What is threatening now is not an unwelcome answer but a dawning awareness
that there may be no basic overarching questions to which there could be even
unwelcome answers. For instance, if there is less of a sense of crisis now
about the reality of the self, it is not so much because we have gotten used to
unwelcome answers, or even countered them with more welcome ones, as it is
that even what previously had seemed like a single, central question about the
reality of the self has become hopelessly variegated. It evolved into a syndrome
of related questions that are so technical that none but the carefully initiated
can even wade into the project of investigating them without soon drowning
in a sea of symbols, technical distinctions, and empirical results.

Where will it all end? In our admittedly speculative view, today’s hand-

wringing about the problem of fragmentation and the still lingering hope for
eventual reintegration will be replaced by the recognition that the multifaceted
threads of debate and theorizing are never going to be gathered together and

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woven into a single fabric. We have passed from an era in which the chief
source of concern was unwelcome answers and both the hope and fear of new
knowledge, to one in which the chief source of concern is lack of any
comprehensive questions, let alone answers, and the certainty of continually
increasing, albeit fragmenting additions to our knowledge. In short, there is
nothing to do about fragmentation, except perhaps to get over the feeling that
there is anything that needs to be done about it. We have come a long way
since Plato. The crucial turn came during the eighteenth century, when
knowledge became secularized. Enlightenment thinkers, in effect, made a pact
with the devil. They set in motion a process that has culminated, beyond their
wildest dreams, in knowledge if not of the self per se, then at least of human
nature and of the rest of the natural world. In exchange, they relinquished
their souls.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 The translations of Lucretius in the passages quoted are due to R.E.Latham. Other scholars

translate these crucial passages differently. In William H.D. Rouse, for instance, Lucretius
wrote, ‘Even if time shall gather together our matter after death and bring it back again
as it is now placed, and if once more the light of life shall be given to us, yet it would not
matter one bit to us that even this had been done, when the recollection of ourselves has
once been broken asunder’ (Lucretius 1924:255). In H.A.J. Munro’s translation, the
same passage reads, ‘And if time should gather up our matter after our death and put it
once more into the position in which it now is, and the light of life be given to us again,
this result even would concern us not at all, when the chain of our self-consciousness
has once been snapped asunder’ (Lucretius 1940:131).

Even though the word repetentia, which Latham translated as identity is translated

by Rouse as recollection of ourselves and by Munro as self-consciousness, the point of
Lucretius’ reflections remains basically the same. It is that one’s body and spirit, including
one’s memories, must be united and exist continuously into a future about which it is
rational for one to feel egoistic concern. Once this continuity is broken, as it is at bodily
death, then rational egoistic concern is no longer possible. A natural way to express this
point is that once this continuity is broken, then rational egoistic concern is no longer
possible because we no longer exist.

In the eighteenth century, Lucretius was studied by virtually every British thinker.

So, whatever he may have meant in the passages here under discussion, to assess his
influence on subsequent accounts of self and personal identity, it is necessary to consider
what others took him to mean. Abraham Tucker, writing toward the end of the eighteenth
century, took Lucretius to be making a point not just about memory and self-concern,
but about identity and self-concern. According to Tucker, Lucretius was forced to consider
the objection that ‘the atoms, some thousands of years hence, after infinite tumblings
and tossings about, would fall into their former situation, from whence a thinking, feeling
soul must necessarily result: but he denied that this would be the same soul. Just as
when a company of dancers assemble together and dance for 6 hours, the whole is one
ball: but if they leave off at the end of 3 hours, and a fortnight afterwards a second party
is proposed whereon they meet to dance for 3 hours again, this is a ball too, but another
ball distinct from the former. So the soul, which is but a dance of atoms, cannot be the
same… [and] therefore, whatever wretched fortune may befal it, we, that is, our present
souls, have no concern therein’ (Tucker 1805, v.7:11–12).

2 For instance, in a later section of the same Ennead from which the previous remarks

were taken, Plotinus wrote that when ‘a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a
twin birth or in the animal order to a litter; there is a splitting and diverging of the seed,
every divergent part being obviously a whole: surely no honest mind can fail to gather

NOTES

179

that a thing in which part is identical with whole has a nature which transcends quantity,
and must of necessity be without quantity: only so could it remain identical when quantity
is flitched from it, only by being indifferent to amount or extension, by being in essence
something apart. Thus, the Soul and the Reason—Principles—are without quantity’
(Plotinus 1952:194). It would take us too far afield to pursue the question of how this
passage should be interpreted. However, it clearly suggests how Plotinus would have
responded to the possibility of a person’s fissioning into two apparently separate persons,
neither of which is conscious of the other’s internal mental states in the same ‘first
person’ way in which the other is conscious of them. What it suggests is that Plotinus
would have thought that both of these apparently separate persons (that is, the fission-
descendants) would actually be the same person as the pre-fission person and as each
other. Plotinus may or may not have entertained this idea. As we shall see in Chapter 2,
Locke’s disciple, Anthony Collins explicitly endorsed it.

3 When he died, Locke did not have a copy of Plotinus in his library, so, the suggestion

that he read Plotinus in the original is speculative. Locke did, however, own copies of
the main works of Cudworth, More, and Smith, who quoted profusely from Plotinus. It
is also known that, in 1682, at about the time Locke wrote his first journal entry on the
role of conscious memory in identity, he read Smith’s Discourse on Immortality, and
also read Cudworth shortly thereafter, well before he wrote the 1683 journal entry which
gives his first definition of personal identity. See Aaron and Gibb 1936:121–3; Ayers
1991; Marshall 1994.

4 For more on this and related passages, see Sutton (1998:72–3).
5 Leibniz would have been included in those who set the stage, if he had published his

Discourse on Metaphysics (section 34), which was written in 1686 and sent to Arnauld.
In this work, Leibniz’s reflections on personal identity are remarkably similar to Locke’s
own private Journal notes on the issue, written several years earlier. For instance, in
comparing the human soul to animal souls, Leibniz wrote, ‘But the intelligent soul,
knowing what it is—having the ability to utter the word “I”, a word so full of meaning—
does not merely remain and subsist metaphysically, which it does to a greater degree
than the others, but also remains the same morally, and constitutes the same person. For
it is memory or the knowledge of this self that renders it capable of punishment or
reward’. As we shall see, Leibniz’s focus on the relationship between recollective memory
of past actions and capacity for reward and punishment is echoed perfectly in Locke’s
account. Leibniz continues: ‘Thus the immortality required in morality and religion
does not consist merely in this perpetual subsistence common to all substances, for
without the memory of what one has been, there would be nothing desirable about it’.
Again, the focus is similar to Locke, in that ‘forensic’ concerns involving this life as
well as any future life do not depend on mere substance, but on memory. But Leibniz
continues with a passage more reminiscent of Lucretius (who may have been his source)
than of arguments that Locke would use: ‘Suppose that some person all of a sudden
becomes the king of China, but only on the condition that he forgets what he has been,
as if he were born anew; practically, or as far as the effects could be perceived, wouldn’t
that be the same as if he were annihilated and a king of China created at the same instant
in his place? That is something this individual would have no reason to desire’ (Leibniz
1989:65–6). Like Lucretius, Leibniz supposes that without memory, even a reconstituted
‘self’ would not really be oneself, at least with respect to self-concern, and that this
would be so even if the reconstituted self were a continuation (or reconstitution) of
one’s substance. For more on Leibniz’s views on self-concern, see Bobro 1998.

6 Locke was interested in the topic of the Trinity, and owned several critiques of Sherlock’s

views, published before the second edition of Locke’s Essay. He also owned the 1694
edition of Sherlock’s book. In correspondence, in 1690, one of Locke’s friends in Holland
commented on Sherlock’s book in a letter written to Locke (De Beer 1979, v.4:145). It

NOTES

180

hardly seems possible that Locke could have failed to have read Sherlock’s book shortly
after it came out. Furthermore, as Ayers (1991, v.2:257, 323) has suggested, it seems
that Locke borrowed some language, if not ideas, from Sherlock’s work. See also
Wedeking (1990), on the relationship between Sherlock and Locke.

1 PERSONAL IDENTITY

1 Locke structured his larger account of identity around two fundamental assumptions:

that two things of the same kind cannot exist in the same place at the same time; and that
one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence. He made two additional assumptions,
which are less clear: that there are only three basic kinds of substance: God, finite
intelligences, and bodies; and that the identity conditions for a substance or mode depend
on the idea of that substance or mode. The first of these two latter assumptions is unclear
because it is not obvious what Locke understood by two or his three basic kinds of
substance, ‘finite intelligence’ and ‘body’. He surely thought that angels are finite
intelligences. However, angels are immaterial and, hence, not composed of any more
basic parts which may themselves be substances. What about humans and persons?
Locke admitted that, for all we know, humans may be wholly material. By implication,
he seems to have admitted that persons too may be wholly material. But, then, are
humans and/or persons also finite intelligences? A reason for thinking that, in Locke’s
view, humans and persons may not be genuine substances and, hence, may not qualify
as finite intelligences, is that humans and persons may be composed of material atoms,
which Locke clearly did regard as genuine substances. Another reason for thinking that
humans and persons may not be genuine substances is that it would help explain why in
remarking that ‘if Person, Man, and Substance are three Names standing for three different
Ideas’, it is ‘one thing to be the same Substance, another the same Man, and a third the
same Person’, Locke contrasted Substance, Man, and Person (Locke, 1975, II.xxvii.7;
332).

In the case of the second assumption, it is unclear whether Locke subscribed to

what has come to be known as an absolute or a relative conception of identity. On an
absolute conception, the relation of identity which obtains between things is always the
same even though the kind of things between which it obtains may vary. Thus, we mean
the same thing in saying of a chair or a person that exists today that it (or a stage of it
which exists today) is the same chair or person that existed yesterday, even if chairs and
persons are different kinds of things. On a relative conception, by contrast, there is a
different kind of identity corresponding to each different kind of thing. And relative-
identity theorists reject the identity of indiscernables—the principle that if two things
are identical, then they have all of the same properties. Instead, relative-identity theorists
maintain that it is possible for two things to be identical under one description but not
under another. Commentators differ about which view of identity it is most plausible to
ascribe to Locke (see Uzgalis 1990). For our purposes, it will not matter whether Locke
subscribed to an absolute or a relative conception of identity.

2 The futility of seventeenth-century debates involving the soul can be seen by considering

the titles of some of the ‘psychological theses’ defended at Harvard University during
the seventeenth century: one body does not have a plurality of souls; the soul is wholly
in the entire body and in every part of it; the soul has its most natural seat in the body;
the soul is unaffected by the body; the functioning of the soul depends on the body; life
is the union of form and substance; no soul consists of the form of the animate being; the
destruction of the soul entails that of the composite; and, somewhat surprisingly—the
rational soul is divisible. (Roback 1964:31–2).

3 At this time, Aristotelian psychology was actually quite a bit more diverse than we have

indicated. For an excellent account, see Hatfield 1995.

NOTES

181

4 Ayers 1991: v.2, ch.18, nicely explains why in this respect Locke’s account is inadequate.
5 Sergeant 1697: ref.14, sec.12; Clarke 1738: v.III, 787.
6 This is something that Locke’s early critics often had trouble grasping. Edward

Stillingfleet, for instance, asked, ‘From whence comes Self-consciousness in different
times and places to make up this Idea of a Person? Whether it be true or false, I am not
now to enquire, but how it comes into this Idea of a Person? Hath the common use of our
Language appropriated it to this Sense? If not, this seems to be a meer Arbitrary Idea;
and may as well be denied as affirmed’. Stillingfleet 1698:59; quoted in Fox 1988:40.

7 Part of the problem is that commentators have radically different views about what

Locke meant by substance; compare, for instance, the excellent but radically conflicting
discussions of this question in Ayers (1991: v.2, pt. I), and McCann (1994). But even
were it clear what Locke meant by substance, there are still profound difficulties in
determining what Locke took to be the substantial status of both humans and persons.
On this latter question, compare, for instance, Atherton (1983), Alston and Bennett
(1988), Bolton (1994), and Lowe (1995).

8 See also Locke 1975: II.xxvii.10; 336, II.xxvii.25; 345–6.
9 See also Ibid.: II.i.20;116; II.i.22; 117; II.xi.8; 158; III.iii.7; 411, etc.

10 Compare Ayers 1991: v.2, 266–7.
11 Uzgalis 1990.
12 See, e.g., Alston and Bennett 1988; Bolton 1994; Lowe 1995.
13 See also Locke 1975: III.vi.27; 455.
14 See, e.g., Ashcroft 1969, who stresses Locke’s preoccupation with theological concerns.

Ashcroft is roundly criticized by Ayers (1991: v.1, 123). In our view, the truth about this
aspect of Locke’s thought lies somewhere between the accounts of Ashcroft and Ayers.

2 FISSION

1 See, e.g., Wiggins 1967; Parfit 1971, 1984; Shoemaker 1970, 1984; Perry 1972, 1976,

1978; Lewis 1976, 1983; Nozick 1981; Brennan 1988; White 1989; Sosa 1990; Rovane
1990; Unger 1991; Hirsh 1991; Baillie 1993; Hanley 1993; Doepke 1996; Martin 1995,
1998.

2 That fission examples were discussed throughout the eighteenth century will come as a

surprise to many contemporary students of personal identity theory. It will even come as
a surprise to some who are also students of eighteenth century philosophy. Paul Helm,
for instance, argues that neither Locke nor eighteenth century ‘Lockeans’ would
acknowledge the relevance of fission examples as objections to Locke’s theory of personal
identity since they were interested only in factual and not also in conceptual objections
to his account (Helm 1977).

3 See Fox (1988: Chs.3–4).
4 Alexander Pope et al., Memoirs Of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of

Martinus Scriblerus (1966). At the time, George Berkeley was a good friend of Arbuthnot
and so may well have read Scriblerus and probably at least knew of its contents. In the
nineteeth century, Thomas Brown, in his influential Lectures on the Philosophy of the
Human Mind (1820), quotes approvingly from Scriblerus, v. 1, 118–19, v.2, 489–70.

5 For instance, Thomas Brown, Reid’s leading successor early in the nineteenth century

and an important influence on James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and William James, wrote,
‘Although the constant state of flux of the corporeal particles furnishes no argument
against the identity of the principle which feels and thinks, if feeling and thought be
states of a substance, that is, essentially distinct from these changing particles, the unity
and identity of this principle, amid all the corpuscular changes, —if it can truly be
proved to be identical, —furnishes a very strong argument, in disproof of those systems
which consider thought and feeling as the result of material organization. Indeed, the

NOTES

182

attempts which have been seriously made by materialists to obviate this difficulty, involve,
in every respect, as much absurdity, though certainly not so much pleasantry, at least not
so much intentional pleasantry, as the demonstrations which the Society of Freethinkers
communicated to Martinus Scriblerus…The arguments which they are represented as
urging in this admirable letter, ludicrous as they may seem, are truly as strong, at least,
as those of which they are the parody; and, indeed, in this case, where both are so like,
a very little occasional change of expression is all which is necessary to convert the
grave ratiocination into the parody, and the parody into the grave ratiocination’ (1820:
v.I, 118–19).

6 See Ducharme (1986) on Clarke’s anticipations of Butler’s arguments.
7 Curiously, Burthogge, in the book in which he described the Siamese twins, previously

mentioned, had made the same basic criticism against Sherlock’s account of the
‘numerical oneness’ of the self being constituted in consciousness. Ironically, Burthogge’s
book was dedicated to Locke, who was about to publish his own theory of personal
identity, to which many critics, to this day, think the same criticism applies. Burthogge
writes: ‘A Being (and even a Cogitative Being as Being) must be conceived to be, before
it can be conceived to Act; so again, it must be conceived to act, that is to Think to
Reason, to Love, to Hate…for some moment of Reason Before it can be conceived to be
Conscious of these its actings. Now for that Moment of Reason, in which a Spirit is
conceived in Being, without being conceived to be acting, and in which it is conceived
Acting before it becomes Conscious of its actings, in that precedent moment, (which
speaks Order, not Duration,) it must be conceived to be one with it self, and numerically
different from every thing besides; and therefore that it is so, cannot arise from self-
consciousness, or its being conscious of its own actings’. (Burthogge 1694:272–3).

3 THE SELF AS SOUL

1 Hatfield (1994, 1995, 1997) has shown that researchers in France and Germany, as well

as in England, contributed importantly to the development of a scientific psychology in
the eighteenth century. This early empirical psychology was a collective vision of
individuals with radically different metaphysical presuppositions; and it was continuous,
rather than discontinuous, with the later development in the late nineteenth century of a
more experimental psychology.

2 See, e.g., Yolton 1983.
3 Late in the eighteenth century, traditionalists were still arguing over whether animals

had immaterial, immortal souls and, why, if they did have souls, they behaved as they
did. As reported in the article on Brutes in the third edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
(1797), Father Bougeant proposed that brutes were really the temporary residence of
devils, until the last judgment. As to why they do not consistently exhibit that intelligence
that they have essentially in their nature, Father Bougeant wrote: ‘I discover the reason
for this: it is because, in beasts as well as in ourselves, the operations of the mind are
dependent on the material organs of the machine to which it is united; and those organs
being grosser and less perfect than in us, it follows, that the knowledge and thoughts,
and the other spiritual operations of the beasts, must of course be less perfect than ours’.
He continues: ‘And if these proud spirits know their own dismal state, what an humiliation
must it be to them to see themselves reduced to the conditions of beasts! But whether,
they know it or no, so shameful a degradation is still, with regard to them, the primary
effect of the divine vengeance I just mentioned; it is an anticipation of hell’ (vol.III,
p.740)

4 See also Clarke 1738:785, 790.
5 Compare ibid.: 802 (Collins).

NOTES

183

6 It can readily be seen how Hume was guided by Shaftesbury’s overall argument,

particularly in Hume’s treatment of personal identity. Their arguments are parallel: both
dismiss the attempts of subtle reason to reach conclusions about simple identity; both
are concerned less with proving a real substantial identity, than becoming clear that even
an assumed and fictional identity will be ‘sufficient ground for a moralist’ (see Mijuskovic
1971, 1974, who makes this point).

7 Numerals in parentheses in our ensuing text are to numbered items in Berkeley 1948.
8 In a letter dated, 25 November, 1729, written to the American philosopher, Samuel

Johnson, Berkeley writes: ‘As to the second part of my treatise concerning the principles
of human knowledge, the fact is that I had made a considerable progress in it, but the
manuscript was lost about fourteen years ago during my travels in Italy; and I never had
the leisure since to do so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject’.
(Berkeley 1965:228). This report, combined with another made by his brother that some
manuscripts were lost off a ship on the way to Naples, combine to suggest that this
particular manuscript was lost at sea along with the others.

9 Reid, making a somewhat different use of the metaphor of an abyss, writes: ‘Thus we

see that Des Cartes and Locke take the road that leads to scepticism, without knowing
the end of it; but they stop short for want of light to carry them further. Berkeley, frighted
at the appearance of the dreadful abyss, starts aside and avoids it. But the author of the
“Treatise of Human Nature”, more daring and intrepid, without turning aside to the
right hand or to the left, like Virgil’s Alecto, shoots directly into the gulf’. (Reid 1764:
7.iii;207–8).

10 The history of pneumatology as a discipline has, to our knowledge, not yet been written,

but several sources have provided us with some indication of the transformations in the
use of the term. See, in particular, Fiering 1981, and Stewart 1990.

11 In discussing Grove’s views on compassion, N.S.Fiering wrote: ‘Ten years before Frances

Hutcheson set out to refute Bernard Mandeville’s renewal of cynicism and psychological
pessimism, irresistible compassion was already being cited as proof of the real existence
of unadulterated altruism’. Thus, in the Spectator…, a dissenting minister, Henry Grove,
who went on later to become a moderately distinguished lecturer on moral philosophy,
presented an argument for the irreducibility of kind and benevolent propensities to
humankind: “[The] Contriver of human nature hath wisely furnished it with two principles
of action, self-love and benevolence; designed one of them to render men wakeful to his
own personal interest, and the other to dispose him for giving his utmost assistance to all
engaged in the same pursuit”. Man is led to “pursue the general happiness” through his
reason, according to Grove, for he sees that this is the way “to procure and establish” his
own happiness. Yet, if besides this consideration, there were not a natural instinct,
prompting me to desire the welfare and satisfaction of others, self-love, in defiance of
the admonitions of reason, would quickly run all things into a state of war and confusion.
But we are happily saved from this Hobbesian nightmare by “inclinations which anticipate
our reason, and like a bias draw the mind strongly towards” social ends. As part of the
evidence for this thesis, Grove adduces the following observation: “The pity which
arises on sight of persons in distress, and the satisfaction of mind which is the consequence
of having removed them into a happier state, are instead of a thousand arguments to
prove such a thing as a disinterested benevolence” (Fiering 1976:202–3; emphasis added).
The remarks just quoted from Grove continue as follows: ‘Did pity proceed from a
reflection we make upon our liableness to the same ill accidents we see befal others, it
were nothing to the present purpose; but this is assigning an artificial cause of a natural
passion, and can by no means be admitted as a tolerable account of it, because children
and persons most thought-less about their own condition, and incapable of entering into
the prospects of futurity, feel the most violent touches of compassion’. (The Spectator,

NOTES

184

#588, Wed., Sept 1, 1714). In a footnote, Fiering says, ‘This is the earliest use of the
term “disinterested benevolence” that I have seen’ (1976:203).

12 Grove, c. 1720; see note 15.
13 Grove seems, here, to be referring to Locke’s section in the Essay on the ‘Division of

the Sciences’ where he includes ‘Spirits’ as part of ‘natural Philosophy’ and then Locke
goes on to write: ‘The end of [natural Philosophy], is bare speculative Truth, and
whatsoever can afford the Mind of Man any such, falls under this branch, whether it be
God himself, Angels, Spirits, Bodies, or any of their Affections, as Number, and Figure,
etc.’ (Locke 1975: (IV.xxi.2;720).

14 268 ms. pp on the human soul, compared to 32 on angels and 25 on God.
15 Because Grove taught his pneumatology course into the 1730s, it is conceivable that he

read Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732/1837) before generating his own similar example.
However, this seems extremely unlikely as the undated lecture notes refer to a large
number of works, all of which were published before 1720.

16 Butler’s first biographer writes (in the second, revised, edition), apparently based on

direct information from Secker, another minister and Butler’s closest friend: ‘Whilst
our Author continued preacher at the Rolls Chapel, he divided his time between his duty
in town and country; but when he quitted the Rolls, he resided during seven years wholly
at Stanhope, in the conscientious discharge of every obligation appertaining to a good
parish priest. This retirement, however, was too solitary for his disposition, which had
in it a natural cast of gloominess. And though his reclusive hours were by no means lost,
either to private improvement or public utility, yet he felt at times, very painfully, the
want of that select society of friends to which he had been accustomed, and which could
inspire him with the greatest cheerfulness. Mr Secker, therefore, who knew this, was
extremely anxious to draw him out into a more active and conspicuous scene, and omitted
no opportunity of expressing this desire to such as he thought capable of promoting it’
(Butler 1736:68).

4 HUMAN NATURE

1 George Turnbull, who published his Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740) at about the

same time as Hume published the Treatise, also advocated a science of human nature,
using Newton and Bacon as models. However, for Turnbull, the sciences of nature and
of human beings would be co-ordinate sciences using similar methods on different objects.
Reid, Turnbull’s student, would follow a similar course, rather than Hume’s foundational
approach. But despite his scientific intentions, Turnbull, like Hume, also mixed philosophy
with psychology. In Turnbull’s case, it was a mixing of a priori considerations about the
final ends of human nature with empirical investigation of human faculties. Nevertheless,
because of Turnbull’s scientific intentions, as expressed in his teaching and works, he
had an enormous influence on subsequent developments in Scottish philosophy, especially
at Aberdeen, and is thought, more than Hutcheson, to be the father of the Scottish
Enlightenment (See McCosh 1875; Wood 1990).

2 Noxon (1973) proposes that the unified and foundational science of human nature that

Hume tried to achieve in the Treatise, failed, and that Hume knew it failed even before
he finished it. This applies especially to Book I, Part IV, where his analytical skepticism
overwhelmed his constructive psychological goals. Nevertheless, Noxon believes that
for the most part, Hume’s philosophical skepticism did not interfere with his constructive
psychology. Furthermore, Noxon claims that Hume realized that the Treatise was
confusing because of the intermixture of philosophy and psychology and, so, in his
subsequent works tried to keep the focus on one or the other. For example, in Hume’s
skeptical, Enquiry on Human Understanding (1748), he only briefly mentions constructive
associative principles and, in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)

NOTES

185

he pursues more constructive goals. Biro (1993), on the other hand, maintains that in the
Treatise, and even in his discussion of self and personal identity, Hume pursues
constructive goals in ways that have many similarities to current cognitive science.

3 Perhaps Hume was not completely dismissive of intuition as a source of knowledge, as

we have suggested (see, e.g., Treatise, I.iii.i). For present purposes, the issue is not
important.

4 Some recently have argued that Hume was importantly influenced by the debate between

Clarke and Collins, and partly because of it was particularly anxious in the Treatise to
refute Clarke’s views on the self. See Russell 1988, 1995, and McIntyre 1994.

5 On the importance of imagination in accounts of sympathy in the latter part of the

eighteenth century, see Bate (1945), Radner (1979), Engell (1981), and Bromwich (1983).

6 Mercer, for instance, in the context of a generally unsympathetic portrayal of Smith’s

account, stresses that ‘Smith’s most serious confusion stems from his failure to clarify
whether sympathy involves imagining what one would feel if one were in the other’s
situation or whether it involves imagining oneself as the other person’ (Mercer 1972:86).

7 Compare the ‘physics exam example’ in Parfit (1984:246–7).
8 On dissociation, see Hacking 1995. On the child’s acquisition of a theory of mind, see

our discussion of contemporary developments in psychology in Chapter 6.

9 Law himself recognized, with some amazement, the change in context. As his biography

in the 1797 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica notes, ‘There was nothing in his elevation
to his bishopric which he spoke of with more pleasure, than its being a proof that decent
freedom of inquiry was not discouraged’ (Vol.IX, p.736).

5 THE SELF AS MIND

1 Willey aptly describes Hartley as an instance of ‘that peculiarly English phenomenon,

the holy alliance between science and religion’, and places him in a ‘succession of
English physico-theologians’ that includes Bacon, Boyle, Locke, Newton, and Priestley
(Willey 1940:133).

2 For an extensive and extremely erudite discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

views on the relationship between the physiology of memory and sense of self, see
Sutton (1998).

3 Compare Frankfurt (1971).
4 [Anonymous], 1769, as cited by Tucker (1768–77: v.7, 4).
5 Although unnoted in the nineteenth century for his contribution to scientific method,

more recently Reid has been recognized as the first scientific intro-spectionist, setting a
model that in the latter part of the nineteenth century would be developed into an
experimental introspectionism (Robinson 1976).

6 Compare Reid (1785: v.I, 216).
7 Coleridge 1817:187; Mackintosh 1830:133; Bate 1966:239f; Bromwich 1983: 374.

Hazlitt had sent Mackintosh a copy of his Essay when Mackintosh was in India. He later
wrote of Mackintosh’s grasp of his main idea that ‘the way in which he spoke of that
dry, tough, metaphysical choke-pear showed the dearth of intellectual intercourse in
which he lived, and the craving in his mind after those studies which had once been his
pride, and to which he still turned for consolation in his remote solitude’ (Hazlitt
1825:177).

8 The case of J.S.Mill is particularly intriguing. Although his theorizing about personal

identity was strongly influenced by the Lockean tradition through Hume, Hartley, and
his father, James Mill, he was an original thinker not constrained entirely by this tradition.
The ‘mental crisis’ that he describes in his autobiography, which began in 1826, led him
to investigate aspects of the imagination not appreciated by prior theorizers in this
tradition. For instance, Mill began to appreciate the poetic imagination, particularly

NOTES

186

through the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as to consider the philosophical
contributions of Coleridge. Although the evidence is meager, it seems that Hazlitt, himself,
may have contributed to Mill’s intellectual crisis: In The Spirit of the Age (1825) Hazlitt
criticized Bentham’s calculative reason and lack of imagination (followed in 1826 by
Hazlitt’s essay, ‘Reason and Imagination’). The young Mill was to take up this issue as
his own for awhile, though later to return to a more conservative defense of Bentham.
But Mill wrote about Coleridge’s views as a complement to his (Mill’s) essay on Bentham.
To judge from Mill’s autobiography, it seems that completing these two essays was the
termination of his crisis. Long before, in 1831, Mill published his own, ‘The Spirit of
the Age’, a series of newspaper articles (Mill 1986). Yet, if one looks for citations of
Hazlitt in Mill’s works, there is hardly a mention of him and certainly no mention of
Hazlitt’s Essay. Probably Mill never read it.

9 See, e.g., Hazlitt 1967; Bonner and Lahey 1972; Kinnaird 1978; Mahoney 1978;

Bromwich 1983; Jones 1989.

10 Howe, an early and influential biographer of Hazlitt, called it ‘a book by a metaphysician

for metaphysicians’ and added that ‘the few words we may say of it here’ concern only
‘its relation to Hazlitt’s other works and to his character’ (Howe 1947:76). More recently,
Jones (1989) begins his account of Hazlitt’s life and thought with Hazlitt’s marriage, in
1808, three years after the publication of the Essay! Among those who have considered
the Essay in detail, Kinnaird had as his professed aim to write ‘a biography of [Hazlitt’s]
mind’, but he does not mention Hazlitt’s discussion of fission examples. He does, though,
have interesting things to say about Hazlitt’s contribution to the psychology of self-
concepts, especially that for Hazlitt the sense of self is ‘always in some mode or degree
intersubjective, as existing and acting only in tension with real or imagined otherness’
(Kinnaird 1978:24–30, 58). Bromwich, in his excellent study, does mention Hazlitt’s
consideration of fission examples but only briefly and in a footnote (Bromwich 1983:418,
n.32).

11 Philosophers, even those who have noticed Hazlitt’s early Essay, have had little to say

about his views on personal identity. For instance, Noxon, in discussing sympathetically
Hazlitt’s ethical views, briefly sketches Hazlitt’s account of personal identity but fails
to appreciate its importance (Noxon 1963). And Schneewind, in his well-regarded study
of Sidgwick’s ethics, mentions that ‘Hazlitt in his early days wrote philosophical essays
in one of which he put forward some original and interesting objections to egoism’, but
then Schneewind says no more about it (Schneewind 1977:148).

12 In recent years there has been a re-emergence of interest in episodic memory along the

lines of Locke’s notion of memory involving a recollective process of having been there,
but this kind of memory has been compared to two other kinds. Tulving began with a
distinction between ‘episodic memory’ and ‘semantic memory’ but later added
‘procedural memory’ to his scheme. In his most recent publications, he speaks of the
‘autonoetic’ process, or self-referring aspect, of episodic memory, which contrasts with
the ‘noetic’ process, or ‘knowing that’, without self-reference, which applies to semantic
memories, and the ‘anoetic process’, or knowing how, which applies to procedural
knowledge. See Tulving 1985; Wheeler, Stuss, and Tulving 1997. The role of imagination
in reconstruc-tion of memories has been well known to psychologists from the time of
the seminal work on this issue by Bartlett (1932).

13 See, for instance, Lewis (1976, 1983), on persons as four-dimensional objects.
14 The closest that Hartley came to suggesting a developmental account of the acquisition

of self-concepts was in connection with his discussion of memory in children. For
instance, he says, ‘Children often misrepresent past and future Facts; their Memories
are fallacious; their Discourse incoherent; their Affections and Actions disproportionate
to the Value of the Things desired and pursued; and the connecting Consciousness is in
them as yet imperfect’ (Hartley 1749: v.1, 391).

NOTES

187

15 One might wish to suggest that Hume’s Book 1 discussion of personal identity just is

his account of how one forms a concept of self, and that this is intended as a true
developmental account. But, in addition to the mixed motives—both philosophical and
psychological—involved in the account, which make this attribu-tion speculative, there
is the further difficulty that Hume does not distinguish developmental stages. Hence, his
account, which is not much richer as a developmental account than Locke’s, is either not
meant to be developmental at all or else is only minimally developmental.

16 The real issue, hotly debated in our own times, is whether the metaphysics of persons

has normative implications. See, e.g., Parfit 1984: Pt.3; Korsgaard 1996; and Schechtman
1996.

6 FUTURE OF THE SELF

1 For discussion of both the medical and philosophical aspects of these cases, see Sperry

1968; Nagel 1979; Parfit 1987; Puccetti 1989 (all four are reprinted in Kolak and Martin
(1991:55–88).

2 This example is based on one presented by Shoemaker (1984:119).
3 Parfit’s views may be found in Parfit (1971, 1976, and especially 1984). Other important

work since 1970 that would have been discussed in a more complete survey includes:
Shoemaker 1970; Perry 1972, 1976, 1978; Nozick 1981; Shoemaker and Swinburne
1984; Nagel 1986; Sosa 1990; Unger 1991; Korsgaard 1996; Schechtman 1996; Martin
1998.

4 For more on this example, see Martin (1998:80–5). If the reader is not entirely convinced,

reflecting on the following analogy will help. During most of the eighteenth century—
not to mention earlier—it was taken as a ‘basic fact’ of ‘folk metaphysics’ that ‘what
mattered for survival’ was to persist as the same ‘unchanging and identical’ immaterial
substance. No material substance could perform this function because the body was
constantly changing and, hence, did not preserve identity. Now, in the twentieth century,
a ‘basic fact’ of ‘folk metaphysics’ is that ‘what matters for survival’ is to persist as the
same continuing brain/body, even though the matter of the brain and body is constantly
changing. What will ‘matter for survival’ in a century or two? We suggest that by then
people will be used to all sorts of transformations in self and identification that we can
hardly imagine at the present time. The example in the text represents only the tip of the
iceberg: many additional transformations of ‘self’ may well become accepted as part of
the ‘folk metaphysics’ of the future.

5 For more on this, see Martin (1998: Chs.5 and 6).
6 David Lewis is the philosopher most responsible for the rise of four-dimensional views

of person, especially in Lewis (1976), but see also Lewis (1983).

7 Even, in our own times, well-regarded philosophers have expressed doubts about whether

in the absence of personal persistence, such a theological view can be worked out; see,
e.g., Ayers 1991: v.2, 272.

8 See Kusch 1995; Reed 1997.
9 For instance, compare Boring (1950:219–33) with Passmore (1957).

10 ‘ With vastly good intentions, and very excellent abilities for everything except philosophy,

he had no speculative genius whatever—positively an anti-speculative turn of mind,
which, with a mixture of shrewdness and naivete altogether incomparable, he was pleased
to term common sense’ (Ferrier 1856:494).

11 See Herbart (1813, 1824–5), and Stout (1888), for Herbart’s views on self.
12 See Hallie (1959) for a discussion of de Biran’s views on personal identity and on his

genetic psychology of self.

NOTES

188

13 It would take us too far afield to discuss all aspects of Ribot’s fascinating work. But we

must quote a remark of his which refers, in part, to the Hungarian twins whose ‘organ of
generation’, recall, was shared: ‘Even where the personalities [of the two headed
individuals] are most distinct, there exists an interpenetration of organs and functions
such that each cannot be itself except on condition of being more or less the other, and
of being conscious of the fact’ (Ribot 1891:42). Also, within the context of the organic
basis of personality, Ribot discusses the hypothetical possibility that two individuals
might be identical in all respects: ‘If, by an impossible hypothesis, two men were so
created that their two organisms were constitutionally identical; that their hereditary
influences were rigorously alike; if, by a still greater impossibility, both received at the
same instant the same physical and moral impressions, there would be no other difference
between them than of their position in space’ (p.49). While not exactly a case of fission,
this example does indicate how a late nineteenth century materialist conceives of
duplicates with respect to the concept of personality.

14 Stewart 1829: v.3, 108–61.
15 See Barresi and Moore (1996), for a review of this literature.
16 Neisser (1988), formulated the concepts of the ecological and social selves, as well as

the private self and the extended self, which will be discussed momentarily.

17 One of the criticisms that was put forward in commentaries by the philosophers Bennett

(1978), Dehnett (1978), and Harman (1978), against the evidence presented in Premack
and Woodruff (1978), was that there was no sign that the chimps could represent false
beliefs.

18 See Barresi and Moore (1996) for a review of most of these findings. On the future self,

see Thompson, Barresi and Moore (1997), Moore, Barresi and Thompson (1998), and
Barresi (forthcoming).

189

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199

accountability 18–21, 23–4, 27, 41–2, 75,

105–7, 122, 140; see appropriation

altruism 71, 183 n.11
analytic philosophy xi, 151, 154, 162, 164,

171

angels 70, 72, 114, 126, 180 n.1, 184 n. 13,

anticipation 3, 5, 92, 115, 137, 141, 148,

157, 171

appropriation 8, 18–9, 21–5, 27, 76–8, 130;

see accountability

Aquinas, T. 6
Arbuthnot, J. 39, 182 n.4
Aristotelianism 6, 7, 12–14; diversity of

181 n.3 (ch.1)

Aristotle 3
Arnauld, A. 9, 179 n.5
associationism 78, 86, 90, 104, 111–15,

133–4

144, 146, 164

Aurelius, M. 64

Bacon, F. 112, 184 n.1, 185 n.1 (ch.5)
Baldwin, J.M. 168–71
Bayle, P. 61
Berkeley, G. 49, 65–73, 79, 103, 104, 108,

120, 123, 126, 135, 146, 157, 162, 182
n.4, 183 n.8, 9, 184 n.15; empirical
study of mind 70, 110; identity as
merely verbal 68–9; persons as fictions
65–70; self as simple immaterial
substance 65, 67

Biran, M. de 165–6, 169, 172, 188 n.12

Bourdin, P. 8

Boyle, R. 33, 112, n.1 (ch.5)
Bradley, F.H. x, 148, 152–3, 162

Brown, T. x, 151, 163–4, 182 n.4, 5 (ch.2)
Brown, W. 115
Buddha 64
Burnet, T. 32, 103
Burthogge, R. 39, 182 n.7
Butler, J. 18, 39–41, 47, 49, 64, 73–9, 103,

118, 139, 146, 149, 158, 162, 176, 182
n.6; approaches to knowledge of
morality 73–5; appropriation 76–8;
body as instrument 8, 77; conscience
74–5; early vs. late 73; empirical study
of mind 73–4, 79, 110; human nature as
artifact 74–5; self as fiction 8, 40–1, 78,
149

Cabanis, P. 165
Cambridge Platonism 6, 72, 136, 179 n.3
Campbell, G. 64
Cartesianism 12–4, 32, 38, 72, 81
Cicero 107
Clarke, S. 18, 39–41, 44, 47, 49–50, 62,

65–6, 70, 72–3, 78–9, 103–4, 110–11,
115–16, 118, 120, 127–8, 135–6, 138,
146, 151, 153, 162, 182 n.6, 185 n.4;
memory 35, 40, 57; thinking matter 50–
60; self as fiction 35, 57–8, 149; vs.
Collins 33–8, 51–60

Clement of Alexandria 2
Coleridge, T.S. 139, 186 n.7, 186 n.8
Collins, A. 33–8, 39–41, 47, 51–60, 62, 66,

70, 89, 103–4, 112, 115–16, 127–8,
135, 138–9, 151, 162, 179 n.2, 185 n.4

commissurotomy 155–6

INDEX

200

concern (self-) ix, 4–5, 8, 20–2, 27, 31, 40,

63–4, 77–8, 84–5, 114, 118–22, 137–8,
146–8, 151–2, 178 n.1, 179 n.5

conscience 74–5, 102–3
consciousness 16–19, 27, 39–40, 43, 50,

65–7, 115, 155, 159, 163, 166, 187 n.
14; as criterion of personal identity 10–
11, 14–24, 28–9, 32–6, 38, 40–6, 51,
65–6, 68, 72–3, 78, 85, 87–8, 106–9,
120–2, 137–9, 145, 147, 158, 174, 181
n.6; definition of 55; emergent property
of matter 34–5, 44–5

51–60, 166–7;

reflexive8–9, 11, 16–19, 22, 25, 27, 48,
55, 81, 110, 130, 135, 144, 149–50,
174; self-10–11, 20–4, 91, 93, 168–71,
178 n.1, 181 n.6; social basis of self-
consciousness 144–5, 168–71; unity (or
connectedness) 6, 10–11, 19–22, 30–2,
40, 44, 46, 51, 53–60, 72, 76, 78, 112,
116, 124, 130, 140–1, 147, 151, 159,
169, 166–7, 182 n.7

conversing with the dead 3, 33, 119, 137
Cudworth, R. 179 n.3

Darwin, C. 7
death 2, 4–5, 61–2, 75–6, 99, 116, 136–8,

147, 156–60, 174, 178 n.1

Descartes, R. 7–9, 18, 65, 118, 133, 146
Deutscher, M. 33
development: see mental development
Diderot, D. x
dissociation 30–2, 98, 102, 166
Doddridge, P. 33

emotional contagion 90–3, 96–7, 99, 145,

170, 172–3; see sympathy

Epictetus 64
Epicurus 133
essence: real vs. nominal 25–6, 52–3, 59,

61, 116, 146

Euler, L. 128

false belief: representation of 173–4, 188

n.17

Ferrier, J. 164–5, 188 n.10
fine matter 2–3, 118

fission examples ix–xi, 6, 30, 48, 102, 108,

150–2, 162–3, 181 n.2 (ch.2); Bradley
152–3; Butler 39–41, 78; Clarke and
Collins 33–8; Grove 38, 71; Hazlitt
147–8, 186 n.10; Hume 41–3, 86; in
current theory 154–61; Leibniz 43–4;
Locke 30–2; Plotinus 6, 179 n.2;
Priestley 136–9; Reid 47; Tucker 44–6,
117–18

forgetting 26–9, 35, 56–7, 72–3, 89, 107–8
fragmentation 174–7
Frankfurt, H. 115–16, 186 n.3 (ch.5)
fusion examples 43–5, 117–18

Gay, J. 39, 104
ghosts 3, 71
Gregory of Nyssa 2
Grove, H. xi, 38, 47, 70–3, 126–7, 157,

183 n.11, 184 n.12–13, 15

Hamilton, W. 127, 164
Harley, R. 39
Hartley, D. 79, 104, 110, 111–15, 122–3,

128–9, 133, 136, 144, 164, 185 n.1, 186
n.8, 187 n.14; associationism 112–14;
compassion 113; idea of God 114–15;
methodological materialism 112; unity
of consciousness 112

Hatfield, G. 181 n.3 (ch.1), 182 n.1
Hazlitt, W. ix–xi, 30, 41, 44–6, 48, 115,

123, 135–6, 139–48, 150–2, 154, 162–
3, 165, 168–9, 186 n.7, 8, 10, 187 n.11;
acquisition of self-concepts 144–5;
imagination and the future 140–3; self-
interest 140–1, 146; selfishness 146;
what matters in survival 147–8

Hegel, G. 168
Heidegger, M. 153
Herbart, J. 165–6, 169, 172, 188 n.11
Hobbes, T. 8–9, 11, 50, 61, 71, 85, 96, 100,

128, 149

Hoffman, M. 173
Holbach, P. de 140
Hume, D. 41–3, 47–8, 64–7, 69, 70, 78–9,

96, 101, 103–4, 110–11, 113, 117, 123–
5, 132, 135–6, 139, 145, 149–52, 162,
165, 183 n.6, 185 n.3–4, 186 n.8, 187

INDEX

201

n.15; approaches to personal identity
84–9; foundationalism 80–9; illusion of
substantial self 84; memory in personal
identity 88–9; mixing of philosophy
and psychology 80–96, 184–5 n.1, 185
n.2; on pride 87, 90, 94; on sympathy
87, 90–4

Humphrey, N. 171
Hutcheson, F. 64, 94, 96, 123, 183 n.11,

185 n.1 (ch.4)

hypnotism 166

identification 8, 102, 145–8, 165, 188 n.4
identity of: artefacts 15; inanimate objects

10, 15; persons 10, 15–17; plants and
animals 10, 15, 85–6; see personal
identity

innate ideas 12–13, 60, 104

James, W. 164, 182 n.5 (ch.2)
Johnson, S. 71

Kames, L. 47, 64
Kant, I. x, 44, 123, 127, 130, 132, 150–1,

162, 164–5

Keats, J. 139
King, W. 104

Law, E. 80–1, 103–9, 120, 122, 139, 149,

152–3, 162, 185 n.9

Leibniz, G.W. x, 43–4, 102, 179 n.5
Locke, J. xi, 8–9, 12–29, 33, 38–9, 40–1,

43–4, 46–7, 49–52, 60–3, 65, 68, 71–2,
76–8, 81, 83, 85, 87–9, 94, 96, 102–8,
111–13, 115, 119–20, 122, 127–8, 130,
133, 135–7, 139, 142, 144, 146–7, 149–
51, 155, 157–8, 162–3, 167, 175, 179
n.2, 3, 5, 181 n.7, 182 n.7, 183n.8, 184
n.13, 185 n.1, 186 n.8, 187 n.12, 187
n.15; absolute vs. relative conception of
identity 180 n.1; assumptions regarding
identity, 180 n.1; delusions of identity
28–9; fission-like examples 6, 30–2,
181 n.2; historical plain method 12;
mundane metaphysics 28–9;
pathologies of memory 26–9, 62;
simple memory interpretation 16–18,

66, 72–3, 152–4, 157–8, 175; tabula
rasa 23; theological pragmatism 29, 60,
63, 181 n.14; Trinity 9–11, 180 n.6

logical positivism 153
Lucretius 3–5, 120–2, 175, 178 n.1, 179

n.5

Mackintosh, J. 139, 186 n.7
Mandeville, B. 96, 100, 183 n.11
Martin, C. 33
memory 4, 21, 23, 40, 78, 102, 113, 124,

141–2, 149, 152–4, 157–8, 164, 167,
175, 179 n.3, 5, 186 n.2, 187 n.14;
Clarke and Collins 35, 55–9; episodic
142, 187 n.12; genuine vs. mere
seeming 33; Hume 87–9; Locke 16–18,
26–9; Reid 129–32; Shaftesbury 62–4

mental development 9, 23, 50, 54, 94, 111,

113–15, 129–30, 135, 144–5, 149–50,
165–6, 169–74, 187 n.14–15

Mesmer, A. 166
Mill, James x, 151, 163–5
Mill, John S. x, 151, 163–5, 186 n.8
More, H. 179 n.3

Neo-Platonism 6, 13
Newton, I. 33, 80, 112, 120, 123, 133, 185

n.1

Origen 2

Paley, W. 44, 115
Parnell, T. 39
Parfit, D. xi, 5, 150–1, 157–61; branch-line

example 160–1; empty questions 160;
quasi-memory 157–8

Paul, St. 32
Perronet, V. 103–4
personal identity x, xi, 2, 8, 10–11, 13–18,

21, 26–49, 51, 60–2, 64, 70, 72–3, 77–
8, 80–1, 83–9, 101–9, 114–15, 118–23,
129–32, 149–61, 163–5, 171, 174, 179
n.3, 181 n.2, 182 n.5, 7, 183 n.6, 185
n.2, 186 n. 8, 187 n.11, 15; as fiction
35, 41–2, 86, 89, 145–6; intrinsic- vs.
extrinsic-relations views, 154–5, 175–6;
philosophy vs. psychology of 11, 83,

INDEX

202

171; question of what matters in
survival ix, 4–6, 120, 136–8, 147–8,
156–7, 178 n.1, 179 n.5, 187–8 n.4;
revolution in theory of ix, 162–3, 174–
7; substance vs. relational accounts ix,
9, 47–8, 65–9, 84–5, 110, 162–3, 180–1
n.1; traditional question regarding ix

persons: forensics 19, 105–6; substance 19,

24–5, 105–8; three- vs. four-
dimensional views of 161, 175; vs.
humans 13, 19–20; vs. selves 20–1

phenomenology 153, 176
Piaget, J. 168
Plato xi, 2, 3, 5–7, 17, 30, 77, 174–5, 177
Platonism 3, 6–9, 13, 76, 149
Plotinus, 2–3, 6, 179 n.2, 3
pneumatology xi, 70–3, 123, 125–7, 183

n.10, 184 n.15

Pope, A. 39
Premack, D. 171–3, 188 n.17
Price, R. 136, 138–9
Priestley, J. 30, 32–3, 47–8, 103, 109, 111–

12, 122–3, 125–6, 132–9, 144, 150–4,
162–3, 185 n.1; and Hartley 133–4,
136; and Reid 123, 128–9, 132–5; first
principles vs. habit 133–5; identity not
what matters in survival 137–8

Putnam, H. 43

Reid, T. 47–9, 66, 70–2, 94, 110–11, 123–

32, 133–6, 144, 151, 157, 162, 165,
169, 182 n.5, 183 n.9, 185 n.1 (ch.4);
empirical methodology 123–4, 186 n.5;
memory and personal identity 131–2;
on mental development 129–30;
pneumnatology 125–7

replicas 4–5, 35–7, 43, 45, 138–9, 160–1
resurrection 7, 13–14, 18, 20, 32–3, 36–7,

66, 81, 103–4, 112, 122, 136–9, 147–8,
153, 163

Ribot, T. 166–8, 188 n.13
Rousseau, J. x, 23, 144
Royce, J. 168–9
Russell, B. 165

Scottish common sense approach, 123–4,

164, 168

Scottish enlightenment 123, 185 n.1
Scriblerus 38–9, 167, 182 n.4, 5
Sergeant, J. 18, 40, 181 n.5
self ix–xi, 28–31, 37–8, 57, 62–4, 69, 81,

89–90, 93–5, 114–15, 130, 151–3, 179
n.5, 186 n.2; as fiction 1–2, 25, 40–2,
58, 66–9, 78, 85, 88–9, 149–50, 153,
174; as illusion, 83–4; as mind ix, 1–2,
7, 20–1, 60, 84–8, 110–11, 149–50, 185
n.2; as soul ix, 1–2, 6, 14, 48–9, 60,
108, 110, 149, 163; ecological 172, 188
n.16; existential crisis 1–2, 65–8, 70,
176, 183 n.9; extended, 174, 188 n.16;
origin of 21–2, 135, 143–5, 165, 171–4;
private 174, 188 n.16; social conception
of 33, 137–8, 144–5, 168–72, 186 n.10

self concept: psychology of 9, 129, 135,

143–5, 165, 168–74, 186 n.10, 187 n.
14, 15; see mental development

self-concern: see concern
self-consciousness: see consciousness
self-constitution 8, 16, 21–2, 76–8
self-interest ix, 78, 113–15, 138, 140–1,

146–8, 151–2, 183–4 n.11

self-love 95–6, 141, 183–4 n.11
self-recognition 172–3
self to body as pilot to ship 7–8, 77
self-unity 44–6, 65, 116–18, 182 n.7; at a

time vs over time 5–6, 66–7, 72–3, 88,
131–2, 165, 174

Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (A. Cooper) 60–4,

183 n.6

Sherlock, W. 9–11, 180 n.6, 182 n.7
Siamese twins 39, 167, 182 n.7, 188 n.13
Sidgwick, H. 151–2, 187 n.11
sleep 46, 72, 75, 108
sleep of the soul 81, 104, 109
Smith, A. 43, 80, 94–102, 123, 145, 169,

185 n.6; dissociation 98–9, 101–2;
mixing ethical theory and psychology
80, 94–5, 100; on being sympathetic to
varying degrees, 95–6; on being
sympathetic with the dead 99; on
sympathy as bodily 97; value of
negative emotions 101

Smith, J. 179 n.3
Socrates 2, 3, 27, 30

INDEX

203

soul 19, 23, 39, 54, 69, 99, 125, 158, 162,

184 n.14; and pneumatology 70–2;
animal soul 14, 50; as active principle
67; as extended 2, 51, 136; as fine
matter 2–3, 121–2, 178 n.1; as
immaterial substance ix, 1–3, 6–7, 13–
14, 16, 20, 32, 38, 48–51, 59–60, 70,
79, 103–4, 108, 110–12, 116, 118, 123–
4, 133, 136, 144, 153, 163, 175, 179
n.2; as immortal 1, 3, 7, 13–14, 33, 38,
48, 50–1, 65, 103–4, 112, 116; as
indivisible 2, 6–7, 13, 49, 51, 163; as
material brain 47, 49–51, 53, 56, 59,
72, 104–5, 111–12, 133, 138–9; at the
resurrection 7, 14, 32–3, 104, 112, 138–
9; definition of 51, 72; naturalization of
x, 5, 17, 47–50, 56, 59–60, 65–6, 70–2,
79, 85, 88, 110–12, 123–4, 163, 166–7,
169–70, 175, 177; not the basis of
personal identity 13–14, 17–18, 103,
108, 120, 179 n.5; of the finger, 6, 31–
32; persists after death 3, 5, 7, 14, 104,
119–20; reincarnation of 13, 27, 120;
union with body 5, 7, 14, 39, 49, 72,
108, 118, 175, 181 n.2 (ch.1)

Spectator, The 71, 183 n.11
Spinoza, B. 9, 11, 149

Stewart, D. 169
Stillingfleet, E. 32, 49–50, 181 n.6
Swift, J. 39
sympathy 71, 80, 113, 169, 185 n.5–6;

Hazlitt 144–5; Hume 87, 90–4; Smith
94–102; see emotional contagion

thinking matter 33–4, 46, 49–51, 54, 59,

71–2, 81, 112, 122–3, 126–8, 167

Thomas, D. 99
Toland, J. 32
Tracy, D. de 165
Trinity 10–11, 180 n.6
Trotter, C. 32, 103
Tucker, A. 44–7, 110–11, 115–23, 162, 178

n.1; action theory 115; free will 116;
mundane soul, 119–20; vehicular body
119

Turnbull, G. 123, 184–5 n.1

Vico, G. 139

Watts, I. 32–3, 38, 103
Wolff, C. x, 126–7
Woodruff, G. 171–3, 188 n.1

Document Outline

Book Cover
Title
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Personal identity
Fission
The self as soul
Human nature
The self as mind
Future of the self
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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